I dont see many survival hunters around

[Deleted]

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.

At least we weren't a one trick pony as we are now and with proper gear and rotation mana wasn't really a problem. But back then if I wanted to, I could unload all my mana into a huge burst of damage. Right now all I can do is what the rotation allows me, there's no variation outside of that.

But I guess all classes are becoming more homogenized like this. You can't really do something outside of what Blizzard want you to do anymore. There's no high risk high reward gameplay. You just do your rotation until your IWin button procs and you press it. Rince and repeat.

[kamuimac]

People have been asking for Melee Hunters since, well, forever, dude. In fact, a lot of people were upset when they initially removed all melee abilities from hunters.

no people were asking for ability to do dmg in melee range since forever since until cata hunters were usless if they had to stack on boss -_- people were never asking for strickly melee hunter spec ><

I miss MoP Surv

i miss cata surv :P

[MrTharne]

But back then if I wanted to, I could unload all my mana into a huge burst of damage. Right now all I can do is what the rotation allows me, there's no variation outside of that.

For BM you can choose to use BW with 0 focus and all your abilites on CD if you want or you can use it when full focus and CD are up for huge burst of damage. There will always be an optimal way to play anyway, there always was.

[Deleted]

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.

You make it sound like we were oom as fast as an arcane mage which is false. And you make it sound like doing less damage to regen is the end of the world when in fact spamming steady shot to regen is just as bad.

Actually in every way possible mana>focus for hunter.

WOTLK hunter is just miles ahead any other hunter iteration (even though we had some interesting talents during MOP)

[Bepples]

Like it or not, there are people who enjoy the class as it as now.

There are also people who really liked Cataclysm as an expansion, yet in terms of sub numbers and over-all reception of the game it truly lived up to its name. It's all about proportion. Some people really like survival; the majority do not. It is at the very best one of the most unpopular DPS specs in the game, and that is NOT GOOD considering it is brand new and you should expect a lot more people trying it out.

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.

Breathtakingly innaccurate.

Firstly, we were GCD-capped before we had focus and we were GCD-capped after. Nothing changed there. (Although Legion made us not GCD capped, because Celestalon is a fucking moron)

Secondly, we had far more casted abilities when we had mana. Beast Mastery in BC literally did nothing but Steady Shot/Auto Shot. Marksman in WotLK used Steady Shot as a filler when waiting for cooldowns on Chimera Shot, Aimed Shot, and Arcane Shot (and eventually you would drop Arcane Shot from the rotation as well).

So where the hell are you coming from with "we spam steady shot now"? Steady shot was spammed just as much, if not more, when we had mana. Also, don't forget that we were far less mobile. Hunters before Cataclysm were far, far slower-paced.

Oh, and we really weren't that well distinguished from Casters.

Focus was a godsend.

Don't even start on this. I hate our current resource. Hunters were better with mana and we aren't a non magical class. Especially night elf hunters are more priestess of the moon kind of warriors, but they had to turn us into rogues I guess.

No, we weren't. What did we do better when we had Mana? Mana and cast-times made us no different from other casters.

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).

A lightning mage would be a mage using a different type of magic, so no it would not be a drastic change. A ranged warrior would be. But it would be a bad change for the same reason Survival going melee is a bad change. People who play warriors do not want to play a ranged class. If they did, they wouldn't be playing a warrior. I'm sure there are some niche communities that fawn over the idea like the brickheads in this thread, but that does not justify screwing warriors over.

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....

What a stretch. When you try to make a list of "melee hunters" you a) can only come up with 4 items, one of which was so obscure it needed an explanation, and b) you had to include two hunters who used melee skills only ONCE, one of which used a knife once. Well shit. I guess hunters being able to go skinning in WoW is an argument for melee hunters.

Here's a counter: Sylvanas, an actual Warcraft character, is very prominently a mobile archer that does not rely on a pet. Survival was that type of spec. That type of spec flat out doesn't exist anymore. It was replaced by a rogue/warrior mimic that almost no one will fucking go near. In the next few expansions, Sylvanas will be a major character. How can they show off that sort of "fantasy" (I cringe whenever I use that word but that's all you Blizzard acolytes understand) when you can't even be that?

And no, Marksman doesn't count. Marksman is very immobile due to a hard-casted Aimed Shot. Marksman also doesn't have any poisons, and Black Arrow is a suboptimal talent. Sylvanas very much fit exactly how SURVIVAL was from 3.1 to 6.2 inclusive.

It's funny how I ususally argue about Survival's merits on a practical level while everyone defend it usually brings some form of "class fantasy" nonsense to the table, yet it is laughably easy to show how you are full of shit on that part of the debate as well.

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.

It didn't work not just because it was implemented badly, but because people who played Hunters just preferred to play ranged. Hunters have a strong "ranged" identity. While they might have a melee identity, it is far weaker than that of warriors, rogues, paladins, etc. Hence why everyone qualifies Vanilla survival with the word "hybrid". If they wanted melee hunters, the time to make it right was in Vanilla. It was NOT 12 years later after all 3 specs have been well established. Going back to the original idea is not always a good thing, regardless of whatever connotation that phrase brings. For hunters, it's actually an especially bad thing for many reasons.

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.

Never mind the fact that this was irrelevant to what was being talked about there (i.e. the argument of "Blizzard said so"), Survival is demonstrably less popular than not just the other hunter specs, but most of the other SPECS in general.

https://www.warcraftlogs.com/statistics/8

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.

No, that is not true because a) you can have and DID have 3 different identities for the ranged hunter specs before 7.0 and b) it is NOT an imperative that all the specs of one class have to be 100% different from each other. That is a very recent stance invented by Blizzard to give them an argument for large-scale pruning. There were very few specs in the game that could actually argue that they were "too similar" (e.g. Combat and Sublety)

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.

WoD gained about 3 million subscribers as it came out, and then proceeded to lose 4.6 million in 9 months. So not only did it take out all the gains they made, but it also cut into the playerbase that stuck with them for an entire YEAR of no content in MoP. And that's not even accounting for all the inevitable subscription losses since then that we don't know about because they stopped reporting them.

You CANNOT argue that it's a cyclical thing when their sub losses over 2015 were a) literally at a worse rate than they had ever had before and b) they had to stop reporting quarterly subscriber count for the first time ever.

[Morg]

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.

So several of those people weren't going to play hunter and now they are and on top of that the rest of the players have 2 specs to choose between or they can branch at and play some melee for a change, maybe not in mythic raids but farm content/fun 5 mans. If you look into the hunter/survival class in fantasy (back to tolkein the creator of fantasy all the way to other fantasy and mmo games/books) there are plenty of melee elements to a 'hunter' if the class was called 'Archer' id agree but it isn't.

And lets say they made one of the three mage specs (lets go with fire) into a fire wielding melee/caster, i would not complain there is plenty of outside wow lore for it, however its very close to enhance in the WoW universe.
Range warrior, for sure.. Take Huskar from dota and adopt into wow in a creative way, its all about keeping the game fresh.

Realistically they probably got bored shitless of making 3 slightly different range physical specs and decided it was about time to change some stuff around and keep things exciting and there not going to lose anyone, some will swap classes, some will whinge about it but play hunter anyway and some will swap to hunter,

Now don't get me wrong this game has a SERIOUS melee over saturation and i honestly agree that another melee on top of DH is getting a bit crazy with blizzards design for fights favoring range , but this does NOT mean survival shouldn't be melee instead they should look at current specs and make some more range, maybe outlaw should of been a pistol heavy short range spec instead.

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".

Here's where your most confused. YOUR personal standard is 3 range physical specs and your assuming everyone is in agreement with you.. which they are not. It is blizzards decision whether or not they change a spec or not.
And realistically it is their game and their vision, we can give input, tell them things we like dislike, see what by the actual data people are actively playing, but ultimately its in their hands and if in the first content patch arms is deleted and becomes spear throwing frenzy warrior thats their design choice

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.

Yes melee saturation is a thing, make classes more unique and mixed range/melee. People are just having a sook because they have potentially less fotm specs to bounce between.

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?

I can't answer that, but from a business perspective the higher ups would not of been happy and we will see if that reflects in legion being good or not. So far 'most' seem to be excited and there is a decent resurge in subbed accounts.

And lets be honest, you're going to disagree with all or at least most of what i said, and that is perfectly fine too but at this point i don't think they will change surv back at least for legion so no point getting too upset. I actively don't like what they did to enhance so i've swapped back to my old main and its going to be a nice fresh change

[Stormgnoef]

i tried but changed to mm.Barrage is just too much fun

[Puri]

I don't think many hunters seriously wanted a melee spec.

Obviously when it's strong enough or even fotm players will start picking it up. Depending on it's popularity I wouldn't be surprised if Blizzards completely scraps the spec for the next addon as there is really no need for another melee spec ingame.

[Deleted]

Breathtakingly innaccurate.

Firstly, we were GCD-capped before we had focus and we were GCD-capped after. Nothing changed there. (Although Legion made us not GCD capped, because Celestalon is a fucking moron)

Secondly, we had far more casted abilities when we had mana. Beast Mastery in BC literally did nothing but Steady Shot/Auto Shot. Marksman in WotLK used Steady Shot as a filler when waiting for cooldowns on Chimera Shot, Aimed Shot, and Arcane Shot (and eventually you would drop Arcane Shot from the rotation as well).

So where the hell are you coming from with "we spam steady shot now"? Steady shot was spammed just as much, if not more, when we had mana. Also, don't forget that we were far less mobile. Hunters before Cataclysm were far, far slower-paced.

Oh, and we really weren't that well distinguished from Casters.

Focus was a godsend.

Its not about the rotation you use its about the resource system. Mana allows for far more freedom than focus which forces you to use almost the same rotation every time because of focus management. Just look at how shitty the maelstrom system is for elemental shaman

- - - Updated - - -

No, we weren't. What did we do better when we had Mana? Mana and cast-times made us no different from other casters.

Because aime shot and steady shot were not casting according to you? You cast just as much as an MM hunter until Legion where you basically spam half the time and land a few aimed shots here and there

- - - Updated - - -

Here's a counter: Sylvanas, an actual Warcraft character, is very prominently a mobile archer that does not rely on a pet. Survival was that type of spec. That type of spec flat out doesn't exist anymore. It was replaced by a rogue/warrior mimic that almost no one will fucking go near. In the next few expansions, Sylvanas will be a major character. How can they show off that sort of "fantasy" (I cringe whenever I use that word but that's all you Blizzard acolytes understand) when you can't even be that?

LOL at that. Sylvanas is really not your average hunter. She has many skills closer to a warlock than a hunter.

[Dartz1979]

My take on things survival hunter should have stayed as the DoT spec class don't get me wrong and all it still is good but some class specs just need to stay as they were a hunter shoots at ranged they aren't supposed to be melee.

[teverin]

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).

The only reason MM and BM are on the front page more is because more people are bitching about how much they suck and/or hate the spec design. I have actually found that in most cases the specs that get talked about the least are the ones that are more flushed out and fun, but that's just me.

Also, parses in HFC mean jack shit. The game, since pre patch, is all about 110 and leveled artifacts. Many of the sims I have seen show SV hunters in a pretty good spot, many times ahead of the other 2 specs.

[Deleted]

Why would anyone play survival as a hunter when they have 2 ranged specs that will either perform better or like 5% worse? Ranged is always better to have if the class has the ability togo ranged. There are so few fights where melee are favored over ranged there are a few where melee might be a little easier but thats maybe 1/10 bosses.

[Deleted]

I don't want to play a Melee Hunter though I think a melee Hunter spec is great.

Also I think because of the Artifact Ability MM is in a fantastic spot and can be really helpful.
But well....I don't like the hunter specs at all, so I guess I won't play any hunter at all in Legion.

[Bepples]

But back then if I wanted to, I could unload all my mana into a huge burst of damage. Right now all I can do is what the rotation allows me, there's no variation outside of that.

What are you talking about? You spent your mana to 0 and then recharged it in a few seconds with Aspect of the Viper. That was simply a rotational requirement.

But I guess all classes are becoming more homogenized like this. You can't really do something outside of what Blizzard want you to do anymore. There's no high risk high reward gameplay. You just do your rotation until your IWin button procs and you press it. Rince and repeat.

Hunters having cast times, magic dependency, and mana and therefore being exactly like every other caster is far more homogenised than anything since.

So several of those people weren't going to play hunter and now they are and on top of that the rest of the players have 2 specs to choose between or they can branch at and play some melee for a change, maybe not in mythic raids but farm content/fun 5 mans. If you look into the hunter/survival class in fantasy (back to tolkein the creator of fantasy all the way to other fantasy and mmo games/books) there are plenty of melee elements to a 'hunter' if the class was called 'Archer' id agree but it isn't.

"The rest of those players" includes a large amount of people who would have very much liked to play a revived version of 3.0-onwards Survival after the unmitigated disaster that was 6.2 class balance. Now they never will, and they are stuck with 2 very poorly designed specs (these two design fails may or may not have been intentional to push people towards the new Survival; it certainly looks like Survival got far more attention in 7.0. Too bad it didn't work).

And I really don't care about the few-and-far-between instances of melee hunters in media. A) they aren't common and b) in WoW the outcome was that Hunters had 12 years of iterative design as a ranged class.

And lets say they made one of the three mage specs (lets go with fire) into a fire wielding melee/caster, i would not complain there is plenty of outside wow lore for it, however its very close to enhance in the WoW universe.

I would certainly encourage the mages to complain a LOT if one of their specs with a playstyle they very much prefer would be flat out removed in favour of a foreign playstyle given for the benefit of people like you who don't give a shit either way.

its all about keeping the game fresh.

This is such cop-out PR horse shit. Every one of the mountain of mistakes in the past couple years, from no-flying to Artifact Power in general, has this same weak excuse. No, change is not inherently good for the game. Therefore, if you want to make a change to the game, you need to guarantee it will actually help the game in the long run. There are plenty of examples of projects and games gone wrong due to the phenomenon of "change for the sake of change". Just look at Nintendo in general right now.

Hell, I'm hearing this exact same excuse from Nintendo and their fanboys regarding the spectacular failure of a product Metroid Prime: Federation Force, and that game is absolutely fucking bombing right now in general reception and reviews and is likely to fall flat on its face in the sales department too. "We are keeping the franchise fresh" = literally their exact argument. It's flowery language for "change for the sake of change", and that is bad for any product. Change needs to merit itself first.

Realistically they probably got bored shitless of making 3 slightly different range physical specs and decided it was about time to change some stuff around and keep things exciting and there not going to lose anyone, some will swap classes, some will whinge about it but play hunter anyway and some will swap to hunter

Public opinion is heavily against the current state of hunters so they will absolutely lose people. They lost a lot of people for less in other expansions. People WILL just stop playing if they feel ignored by Blizzard.

You can remake ranged specs, too. They had done so in the past, even to Survival in 3.0. Not an excuse. I don't care about what makes Blizzard bored or excited in their design process. They are obligated to make a good product. 2015's subscriber count shows what happens when they ignore players and general common sense.

Now don't get me wrong this game has a SERIOUS melee over saturation and i honestly agree that another melee on top of DH is getting a bit crazy with blizzards design for fights favoring range , but this does NOT mean survival shouldn't be melee[/quote]

Uh, yes. It exactly means that. If there is melee oversaturation, the absolute fucking last thing you do is turn a ranged spec into a melee spec. That's fucktarded. Do you even have any argument to back this moronic idea up or will you just state it like fact or move on?

instead they should look at current specs and make some more range, maybe outlaw should of been a pistol heavy short range spec instead.

So there are four courses of action here, all involve adding demon hunters:
- Keep Outlaw as melee and make Survival melee: + 2 melee specs total
- Keep Outlaw as melee and Survival as ranged: + 1 melee spec total
- Make Outlaw ranged and make Survival melee: + 1 melee spec total
- Make Outlaw ranged and keep Survival as ranged: + 0 melee specs

So they picked literally the worst option when confronted with the issue of melee saturation. You are arguing that they should have picked an option that is equivalent to doing nothing.

You know what would help the issue regardless? Keeping Survival as a ranged. It's crazy that you brought this up in the argument when surely you knew this was a dead end.

Here's where your most confused. YOUR personal standard is 3 range physical specs and your assuming everyone is in agreement with you.. which they are not. It is blizzards decision whether or not they change a spec or not.
And realistically it is their game and their vision, we can give input, tell them things we like dislike, see what by the actual data people are actively playing, but ultimately its in their hands and if in the first content patch arms is deleted and becomes spear throwing frenzy warrior thats their design choice

Why do people in general think "being able to do it" is equivalent to "doing it is justified"? Stupid argument. It hurts the game to make Survival melee or Warrior ranged. They CAN do it, but it's a BAD idea. If we are going to say that absolutely anything they are able to do is justified, then no one is allowed to complain about anything, not even legitimate issues. They are also able to up the subscription price by 400% because it's "their game". Should they go ahead and do that too? I mean, you're clearly ready to call for the customers to be fucked over on Blizzard's whim so why not go a step further?

Yes melee saturation is a thing, make classes more unique and mixed range/melee. People are just having a sook because they have potentially less fotm specs to bounce between.

Stop pretending you can somehow twist melee saturation in your favour here. You can't. Making a ranged spec go melee in an era of melee saturation is a bad decision on account of common sense alone.

And Survival has absolutely fucking never been FotM. It either was "close enough" to the highest Hunter spec so that people could play it, or it was so far behind that people didn't even have the choice. So that part's wrong too.

I can't answer that, but from a business perspective the higher ups would not of been happy and we will see if that reflects in legion being good or not. So far 'most' seem to be excited and there is a decent resurge in subbed accounts.

WoD also caused a surge in subscribed accounts. Any content release will. They could release an expansion with no new levels or zones and you would still get people coming back to see the few things that are new. Legion actually has content that looks good, but that doesn't change the fact that class design continues to spiral downwards and plenty of people will not tolerate that. Especially with the artifact grinds looming: what will people do when their spec with all their artifact power and legendaries gets arbitrarily BROKEN, like Demonolgy and Survival in 6.2? It's not as simple as switching and changing up a stat priority, now. You have to start over on Artifacts (even with max artifact power there is still a lot of grind until you are fully caught up), and you have to grind new legendaries. Do you think the average player is more likely to just suck it up and deal with that extra grind or do you think they will just give up on WoW and say "there's always next expansion"? Remember, they lost a lot of people for far less.

And lets be honest, you're going to disagree with all or at least most of what i said, and that is perfectly fine too but at this point i don't think they will change surv back at least for legion so no point getting too upset.

Again, a common argument which has absolutely no fucking substance. I can name a billion issues where single complaints are largely unlikely to change anything. Why the hell does that mean that people aren't allowed to complain about it? That attitude can go fuck itself. I will call out Survival going melee was a bad decision until the end of the fucking game (which seems to be nearer and nearer at this point ) and I'm confident that time will prove me right. Hell, here we are with it being brand new and the vast majority of hunters aren't going near it. How's it going to fare once the FotM crowd gets bored of it go play demon hunters instead or something? Do you really think any ranged-only hunters (i.e. most of them) are going to make the switch after expansion launch to "try it out", especially with artifact power and legendaries on the line? Give me a scenario where this actually works out because I'd love to hear it.

[Typhod]

Why would anyone play survival as a hunter when they have 2 ranged specs that will either perform better or like 5% worse? Ranged is always better to have if the class has the ability togo ranged. There are so few fights where melee are favored over ranged there are a few where melee might be a little easier but thats maybe 1/10 bosses.

Forgive me if this is a stupid question; but if this is always the case then how come Enhancement shaman is not in the same spot as SV is now? I mean the Shaman does have a ranged spec along with their melee spec, yet I never see the complains like this over at their forum.

[Deleted]

Forgive me if this is a stupid question; but if this is always the case then how come Enhancement shaman is not in the same spot as SV is now? I mean the Shaman does have a ranged spec along with their melee spec, yet I never see the complains like this over at their forum.

Because it has been that way since the game as released. People knew what too expect when they were rolling a shaman. And most raiders are either Elemental or Resto when it comes to Shaman and Enhancement has been lacking for a long time now. They are actually quite nice in Legion / prepatch but again, over shadowed by Elemental.

[Raelbo]

A lightning mage would be a mage using a different type of magic, so no it would not be a drastic change.

So what? A hunter using melee weapons isn't really a drastic change either. Such an easy assertion to make when I control the definition of words like "drastic"

A ranged warrior would be. But it would be a bad change for the same reason Survival going melee is a bad change.

Nice circular argument you have there mate.

People who play warriors do not want to play a ranged class. If they did, they wouldn't be playing a warrior. I'm sure there are some niche communities that fawn over the idea like the brickheads in this thread, but that does not justify screwing warriors over.

I like how you presume to speak for the everyone, and then ad hominem anyone who might have the audicity to take a different viewpoint. It really shows just what an amazing ability you have to construct a great argument!

What a stretch. When you try to make a list of "melee hunters" you a) can only come up with 4 items, one of which was so obscure it needed an explanation, and b) you had to include two hunters who used melee skills only ONCE, one of which used a knife once. Well shit. I guess hunters being able to go skinning in WoW is an argument for melee hunters.

That's pretty asinine of you. It was never intended to be an exhaustive list. I only really needed one to prove my point, and the fact that one of them was obscure to you doesn't mean it's obscure to everyone it was simply one that came to my mind early due to a game I played a lot before playing WoW.

Just off the top of my head, you can add one of the first hunters ever recorded: Orion. He has a sword and a bow. I could go on all day, but honestly, I have proven my point.

Here's a counter: Sylvanas, an actual Warcraft character, is very prominently a mobile archer that does not rely on a pet. Survival was that type of spec.

I would argue that Sylvannas is actually lone wolf Marksman. I have never thought of her as Survival and I have been playing Warcraft since she was introduced. But since you want to use in game characters, let's talk about Rexxar. Melee weapons with a pet at his side?

And no, Marksman doesn't count. Marksman is very immobile due to a hard-casted Aimed Shot. Marksman also doesn't have any poisons, and Black Arrow is a suboptimal talent. Sylvanas very much fit exactly how SURVIVAL was from 3.1 to 6.2 inclusive.

Nah, she has consistently fit MM better.

It's funny how I ususally argue about Survival's merits on a practical level while everyone defend it usually brings some form of "class fantasy" nonsense to the table, yet it is laughably easy to show how you are full of shit on that part of the debate as well.

lol. You should really read what you write before commenting on how full of shit other people are.

It didn't work not just because it was implemented badly, but because people who played Hunters just preferred to play ranged. Hunters have a strong "ranged" identity. While they might have a melee identity, it is far weaker than that of warriors, rogues, paladins, etc. Hence why everyone qualifies Vanilla survival with the word "hybrid". If they wanted melee hunters, the time to make it right was in Vanilla. It was NOT 12 years later after all 3 specs have been well established. Going back to the original idea is not always a good thing, regardless of whatever connotation that phrase brings. For hunters, it's actually an especially bad thing for many reasons.

In your opinion. Which, no offence, you haven't exactly done a great job of defending. What you have succeeded in doing is antagonising a bunch of strangers on the internet with your ranting nonsense.

The idea of a hybrid melee/ranged class, as originally envisioned by Blizzard, just didn't work well for a game. This is because players will want to maximise dps and play accordingly. The original hybrid idea meant that hunters preferred to operate from range, but could fight in melee if forced to do so. In the raiding environment hunters were always going to try to stay at range, thus making the melee thing kinda pointless. If Blizzard had made hunters stronger in melee than at range, then we would all have been standing in melee.

In the end it works a lot better to choose one. So they choose then to drop the melee idea for hunters and focus entirely on being ranged. And this worked fine, but for 2 things:

1) There have always been people who ask for hunters to have melee ability
2) MM and Survival have always been very similar

In the end, maybe the melee hunter will end up being a mistake that they go back on, but personally I think it was worth giving it a go because it is a solution that does answer the two needs I identified above. That doesn't mean it has to find mass appeal. Even if only 10% of hunters end up preferring the spec, IMO that's enough to justify its existence. This game does not 2 almost identical ranged specs, and your argument about mobility has more to do with Blizzard not wanting a 100% mobile ranged class because it breaks the game too much than about having 2 different specs.

[Bepples]

Its not about the rotation you use its about the resource system. Mana allows for far more freedom than focus which forces you to use almost the same rotation every time because of focus management. Just look at how shitty the maelstrom system is for elemental shaman

Yeah, more freedom until it runs out. Which is effectly at set intervals during a fight. Which...actually...isn't much freedom at all.

Focus, on the other hand, has pooling and cooldowns that work with it.

Because aime shot and steady shot were not casting according to you? You cast just as much as an MM hunter until Legion where you basically spam half the time and land a few aimed shots here and there

Yeah, and I didn't play Marksman much before 6.2 because I didn't like that design. 6.2 forced me to play it, but at least Aimed Shot was instant then.

LOL at that. Sylvanas is really not your average hunter. She has many skills closer to a warlock than a hunter.

http://classic.battle.net/war3/neutral/darkranger.shtml

On one hand, it has Life Drain and Charm. On the other hand, it is literally fucking named "Dark Ranger", emphasises mobility, uses Agility as a stat, and has Black Arrow. I fucking wonder which class is more similar.

[Zandalarian Paladin]

They are borked.

Seriously though, right now they're inferior in every possible way compared to all the other hunter specs and most other melees. That says a lot.

[Deleted]

Forgive me if this is a stupid question; but if this is always the case then how come Enhancement shaman is not in the same spot as SV is now? I mean the Shaman does have a ranged spec along with their melee spec, yet I never see the complains like this over at their forum.

Because apparently all the loudmouths here are top guild progression mythic level shit (which they are not most of the time) whining about the slightiest 1% dps loss ("omg my troll racial hunter sidewinders top gear character lost 0.5% dps screw this game i'm done")


Survival is new so they feel they HAVE to whine about it instead of just playing their MM/BM spec. Its like this in every class forum, everyone pretends their spec/class is doomed because of changes and that the grass is always greener blablabla

Meanwhile since you mentioned enhancement shaman, these specs are showing pretty good result for Legion PVE raids/mythic but I guess everyone wants to be the top 1 dps dealer in their guild otherwise their class is crap. Special snowflake syndrom there