I dont see many survival hunters around

[Deleted]

FpicFail, your memory serves you wrong. Gaining our mana back with AotV wasn't nearly as easy as you make it sound, unless someone innervated me.

Blasting my mana away was part of key cooldown windows, outside of that it was important to not starve yourself.

PvE is also only half of the picture as PvP was much prominent back then and mana was great for it, as you could unleash when you needed to. Right now I can't unleash shit, I literally do my standard rotation.

I think mana wasn't perfect, but at least it wasn't fool proof. Let's be honest here, what do you need to think about when playing MM right now? Sidewinders is basically a requirement if you want to be competitive, so all you're actually doing is trying to fit as many Aimed Shots in your Vulnerable window and using Marked Shot at the proper time. Outside of that you can't go wrong, you can't botch your rotation and resource starve yourself for the whole fight. It's just such a safe spec, like all Legion specs.

I don't really mind too much though as I'm 10 years older now and I can welcome the faceroll, that all classes are at the moment, but I also can't close my eyes to the fact, that all specs are fool proof right now and even talents are one dimensional. You want better ST dps? Pick this talent. You want better AoE? Pick this talent. I mean people complain about talent trees, but the current talent system is even more brain dead than the previous one.

[hydrium]

WoW obtained 2 new melee specs this xpac which is a role that is already overcrowded and has few slots in any given raid, I'd be surprised if you saw more.

[Deleted]

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.



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.




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.

Dark ranger is not the same thing as "hunter", nice try.

You can call a warlock a "dark mage" but it won't be accurate either. Draining life and charming and using the undead is completely far away from the hunter archetype which is close to nature and imbues his arrows with weak magic. If you want to use Sylvanas, at least use the example before she became a banshee.

Regarding mana, you actually run out of mana way slower than focus, therefore you can do more stuff during that interval.

[MrTharne]

Dark ranger is not the same thing as "hunter", nice try.

You can call a warlock a "dark mage" but it won't be accurate either. Draining life and charming and using the undead is completely far away from the hunter archetype which is close to nature and imbues his arrows with weak magic. If you want to use Sylvanas, at least use the example before she became a banshee.

That's why MM hunter have Black Arrow that calls an undead minion and the T19 is based on Sylvanas Armor...oh wait.

[Deleted]

That's why MM hunter have Black Arrow that calls an undead minion and the T19 is based on Sylvanas Armor...oh wait.

Yea an ability that was introduced just now,after 10 years of WoW. Old black arrow was just a regular dot arrow with weak magic in it.

Doesn't make much more sense than a spiritraptor shaman but its for fun/flavour purposes

[Demeia]

Pretty sure approximately 0 people were asking for melee hunters.

I have to agree. Melee mages are next, I suppose. Actually, I did know ONE person who wanted to be a melee mage.

Also just seems a godawful idea to add a melee spec until we see how much demonhunters affect ranged to melee ratio. It just wasn't a wise move at this point.

[MrTharne]

Yea an ability that was introduced just now,after 10 years of WoW. Old black arrow was just a regular dot arrow with weak magic in it.

Doesn't make much more sense than a spiritraptor shaman but its for fun/flavour purposes

SpiritRaptor is just a glyph, this is a real full talent. But hey you seem to know better than the Devs.

[teverin]

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.

Oh you bet your ass people would go nuts if they changed enhancement and made it ranged. You'd hear people yelling that there is too many ranged specs and shamans don't need 2 ranged specs blah blah blah.

People are never happy.

[Bepples]

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"

Switching between magic types as a mage can merely involve switching specs. Hunters couldn't be melee at all for most of their existence. So it actually is a very drastic change for hunters and "lightning mage" is not even close.

Next time you try to be snarky, try to actually make sure that what you are saying is actually clever.

Edited to fix ironic typo.

Nice circular argument you have there mate.

Uh, what? The same reasons why Survival being melee is a bad idea applies to the notion of Warriors being ranged. That's not a circular argument. A circular argument would be "Whatever Blizzard does is right, because Blizzard doesn't do any wrong", which seems to be something that a lot of current WoW players believe.

(see, I can be condescending too)

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!

When their viewpoint involves screwing over a large fraction of the people playing a class based on an "interesting idea", they are brickheads. And I don't presume to speak for everyone: I am on the more popular side here because Survival is a demonstrably unpopular spec. Look at the fucking title of this thread. Survival is the least played spec in HFC in 7.0. Spec switching is going to be even harder during Legion. You would expect to see more people playing survival hunters NOW when they are brand new. When you see hardly anyone playing it, what hope could it possibly have in the future?

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.

If it wasn't meant to be an exhaustive list, why did you include a hunter who "once used a knife"? Hunters in WoW could do that too. Rogues and Warriors could also "once use a gun".

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.

Hunters before 5.0 also had a melee and a ranged weapon. Your point?

Survival hunters now ONLY have a melee weapon, so a hunter who used both doesn't exactly work in your favour.

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?

Survival hunters not only had a core ability taken straight from Sylvanas in Warcraft 3, but they also used poisoned arrows (which Sylvanas used against Arthas in Warcraft 3). She was also a mobile ranger, like Survival. Marksman is not a mobile ranger, doesn't use Shadow attacks, and doesn't use Poison attacks.

Rexxar is more similar to Beast Mastery, and his "type" in Warcraft 3 was Beastmaster. He is also much more different from existing Beast Mastery hunters than Sylvanas and 3.0-6.2 Survival hunters. The only ability he had in common with existing hunters was Stampede, which is a BM ability. So it's not exactly a strong argument for survival going melee. The actual "survival-like" character of Warcraft 3 was distinctly ranged.

Nah, she has consistently fit MM better.

Just look at the amount of thought and substance that went into this impenetrable, comprehensive argument.

I guess it works because I have no response to it. How can I? There's nothing to respond to!

In your opinion.

If it's just my opinion and it's actually a great idea, then why is next to no one playing it?

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

There have always been people asking for just about anything. It doesn't mean that a SIGNIFICANT amount of people want it. The opinion for melee hunters has never exactly been popular, and this past year has proven that it is actually quite unpopular.

As for MM and Survival being similar: did MM use Black Arrow? Did Survival use Aimed Shot? Did MM focus on traps? Did Survival focus on hardcasted, heavy-hitters? Did MM have Explosive Shot and Lock and Load? Did Survival have automatic cleave?

The only things they had in common were that they built focus with Steady shot (Cobra shot for Survival, but basically the same thing), and AoE'd with Multi-Shot (and even then, MM's acquisition of damage from Multi-Shot was far different (and far less effective) than Survival's). It's almost like those are core class abilities and MM and SV are SPECIALISATIONS of the same CLASS. What did you expect, two entirely-different classes? This has always been such a non-issue.

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.

The only two 100% mobile ranged classes of 6.2 were literally bottom-of-the-charts.

http://imgur.com/a/MoTvz

You guys always love bringing out the "100% mobile ranged will never be balanced" as if it's a hypothetical, even though a) there was such a thing for 2 expansions and b) they were never better than casters...other than Elemental Shaman, but that's more of a case of them being underpowered (since Blizzard can't help but fuck them over at every turn). And again, in the most recent patch the only 2 that were fully mobile were literally so underpowered that they were not even viable for the whole patch.

So please, tell me more about how game breaking fully-mobile ranged specs are.

[Mirishka]

Well considering the state of hunters on live (LW MM or gtfo) I'm not surprised that you don't see many Survs.

I think its fairly fun from a 'mechanics' point of view, but it isn't remotely competitive and as others have said, is basically built around its Artifact. So atm there's little point in bothering.

[Raelbo]

Also just seems a godawful idea to add a melee spec until we see how much demonhunters affect ranged to melee ratio. It just wasn't a wise move at this point.

Let's deconstruct this idea a little now if we want to think of raid balance:

Before Legion:

Mechanically BM works differently to and MM/SV which were pretty similar, meaning that hunters pretty much chose between BM or whichever of MM or Surv was FotM. Effectively there were only ever 2 active hunter specs at any point during this game.

After Legion:

Hunters can now, in addition to deciding to go BM choose between ranged and melee. Effectively there are now 3 hunter specs on the table. This allows raids to optimise based on requirements without people having to switch characters.

[Morg]

"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).

Once again you're putting YOUR opinion into everyone elses mouths. It's clear from this thread alone that it worked, and surely if you've played this game long enough you know that the vocal minority on forums is a very poor representation of the overall player base which is once again why they will wait for legion numbers (hfc means shit in pre-patch)

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.

You really must not have a very large fantasy interest outside of wow if you think they are few and far between

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.

Well it makes sense that you'd encourage complaining, but who are we to say whether they'd like it or not? There's also the magical 4th spec that can be thrown into the mix

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.

Some people (you it seems) hate change and play the safe game, some people like to change and be innovators and sometimes luck out sometimes strike big.

Different horses for different courses

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.

What public opinion? You and the vocal minority of forum complainers. Once again they will wait until they have their own official numbers in legion and they will have a far better tracking tool than any website that can be linked on here.

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.

And in there eyes melee 3rd spec is a great product, all beacuse you disagree doesn't mean it isn't

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?

Why are you now getting aggressive about this? Thought we were having a nice conversation?

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

Why does it matter if theres extra melee or not.
Lets say for example there long term goal is 8.0 outlaw is now a range spec, warriors get a 4th spec of spear throwy guy and something else change it doesnt even matter. There is now multiple CLASSES that can change between range and melee.

'err but im a hunter/warrior i want to stay X wah wah wah' - thats fine they can do that but the thing is there IS choice. there is potential for range and melee choices, and its not actually about having exactly 12 range and 12 melee dps

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.

But its not a dead end is it, you think it is for some reason.
No one is forcing you to play melee, no one is forcing you to play range either. Blizzard are designing specs they think are themed and fun. Raid composition is a guild 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?

See its a bad idea to you, Blizzard (you know the guys who make the game) decided it was a sweet idea, that plain and simply is why we have a mele hunter spec now.
And seriously they CAN put the price of the game up to $1000 a month, people will unsub and the game will die or the price will go down, I mean if sub price is your argument to anything you must be really out of ideas or flipping your lid in rage. I also already suggested that if this has traumatised you soooo much (lets be honest you wont unsub), then walk away, take your money and leave them a scathing comment in why they wont get your money anymore that is how a market works.

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.

I'm not twisting it at all actually i acknowledged it. And as for melee saturation i have no clue what blizzard are doing but my guess would be they will leave it up to raid leaders to choose who they want to take and keep making things they personally think are really cool



The rest is just you crapping on about your opinion and 'billions' of examples so it doesn't need a reply just a slight chuckle

[Deleted]

Without the artifact you have the same issue as BM, there are huge gaps in your rotation when everything is on cooldown, we are talking 10-20 seconds of having no rotation, and that's terrible for raids.

[Bepples]

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

Enhancement is actually significantly less popular than Elemental because of exactly this. It's just even worse for SV hunters because it's competing with two ranged specs and it's not nearly as well established as Enhancement is. It's almost like the odds are stacked against it working out and it's a bad idea.

FpicFail, your memory serves you wrong. Gaining our mana back with AotV wasn't nearly as easy as you make it sound, unless someone innervated me.

Blasting my mana away was part of key cooldown windows, outside of that it was important to not starve yourself.

It is exactly as easy as I remember it to be because I have been doing it for the past 2 months on a blizzlike 3.3.5 private server. You absolutely cycled through just using everything as normal, then popping Viper and spamming steady shot (the most mana-efficient ability) until you were back up to full, which only took a few seconds.

PvE is also only half of the picture as PvP was much prominent back then and mana was great for it, as you could unleash when you needed to. Right now I can't unleash shit, I literally do my standard rotation.

Yeah because cooldowns don't exist, right?

BM literally has two cooldowns (Bestial Wrath and Aspect of the Wild) which do EXACTLY what you are saying. Focus management hardly fucking exists for MM; your output is dependent on a ridiculous RPPM proc, an

I think mana wasn't perfect, but at least it wasn't fool proof. Let's be honest here, what do you need to think about when playing MM right now? Sidewinders is basically a requirement if you want to be competitive, so all you're actually doing is trying to fit as many Aimed Shots in your Vulnerable window and using Marked Shot at the proper time. Outside of that you can't go wrong, you can't botch your rotation and resource starve yourself for the whole fight. It's just such a safe spec, like all Legion specs.

"Outside of literally everything which can go wrong, you can't go wrong".

It makes it easy to argue that there are no differences when you arbitrarily ignore all the differences.

You absolutely can botch Vulnerability and this will separate average hunters from good hunters. I think it's a shit mechanic, don't get me wrong, but you are acting like mana management was at all hard when it really wasn't.

I don't really mind too much though as I'm 10 years older now and I can welcome the faceroll, that all classes are at the moment, but I also can't close my eyes to the fact, that all specs are fool proof right now and even talents are one dimensional. You want better ST dps? Pick this talent. You want better AoE? Pick this talent. I mean people complain about talent trees, but the current talent system is even more brain dead than the previous one.

Yeah, hunters are easier than ever now and I decry that all the fucking time. That is not the problem of focus, however. The hunter specs in WotLK were really easy, too. Mana was not some hard-to-manage resource that only a few people could master. Really the only thing it served to do was to permanently bind us to the "caster" identity which held the class back for years.

Let's deconstruct this idea a little now if we want to think of raid balance:

Before Legion:

Mechanically BM works differently to and MM/SV which were pretty similar, meaning that hunters pretty much chose between BM or whichever of MM or Surv was FotM. Effectively there were only ever 2 active hunter specs at any point during this game.

After Legion:

Hunters can now, in addition to deciding to go BM choose between ranged and melee. Effectively there are now 3 hunter specs on the table. This allows raids to optimise based on requirements without people having to switch characters.

"Hey, could you switch to survival? We need more melee in the raid right now"

Yeah, that will totally happen.

Also, that "Before Legion" stuff is totally wrong. Patches like 5.4 had very good balance between the three specs and while all of them were different, none of them were hugely different. Now, SV is hugely different. So, it's actually Legion that effectly has 2 active hunter specs.

Once again you're putting YOUR opinion into everyone elses mouths. It's clear from this thread alone that it worked, and surely if you've played this game long enough you know that the vocal minority on forums is a very poor representation of the overall player base which is once again why they will wait for legion numbers (hfc means shit in pre-patch)

I mean, all signs point to "not many people are playing survival", which is the very title of this thread. It's the least played spec in HFC according to Warcraftlogs and this is when it is BRAND NEW. It is clearly the lesser-liked of the specs. Voting on the official forums also tends to be against survival, but that's more anecdotal.

When the patch comes out, what changes? We get even more locked-in to the stuff we are already playing. So unless survival gets a massive amount of incoming people right on Legion launch, it will STAY unpopular for the whole expansion. Once again, do you have a scenario where SV somehow rises from this unpopularity? It's only set to get worse from here on out.

You really must not have a very large fantasy interest outside of wow if you think they are few and far between

You bet. I really don't think "identity" should be the core concern of class design and I think "class fantasy" is a buzzword used to disguise directionless and clueless class design. Focus should be on practicality. SV being melee is not practical.

Well it makes sense that you'd encourage complaining, but who are we to say whether they'd like it or not? There's also the magical 4th spec that can be thrown into the mix

If they picked a class for a particular style and then had that changed under them, they would absolutely not like it. Just like how the majority of hunters do not like survival. If more people liked it, more people would be playing it. That simple. It actually isn't far behind BM or MM on DPS, so where are all the excited hunters flocking to Survival? How is it not vastly more popular than it was in 6.2 when it flat out wasn't viable for raiding at all?

Some people (you it seems) hate change and play the safe game, some people like to change and be innovators and sometimes luck out sometimes strike big.

Nice character assumption. I have never been as opposed to a set of patch changes as I am to this one. I have been mostly supportive of Blizzard's changes over the years but since 6.0 that has changed because Blizzard is no longer careful and they don't listen to players.

Yeah, some people got lucky with careless change. Most don't. Changes can be either positive or negative, and planned changes are more likely to be positive while unplanned changes are more likely to be negative. Common sense. If Blizzard just embraced all change whenever and never had a plan, WoW would be stuck in development hell forever (kind of like absolutely everything Peter Molyneux produces).

What public opinion? You and the vocal minority of forum complainers. Once again they will wait until they have their own official numbers in legion and they will have a far better tracking tool than any website that can be linked on here.

The results of Blizzard's "internal data" include nerfing underpowered specs and buffing overpowered ones CONSTANTLY. Destro locks got a large nerf today while fire mages remain unnerfed. Blizzard's "internal data" didn't stop that fuckery. It also didn't stop Elemental getting screwed over in 6.0 or Survival getting screwed over in 6.2. It didn't stop Blizzard from all their bad design choices from 2014 onwards that drove away literally half their playerbase. Blizzard's "internal data" is a myth as far as I'm concerned: if they were really analysing data and responding accordingly they wouldn't be constantly blundering into every design mistake imaginable, even those where everyone fucking told them so before hand.

And in there eyes melee 3rd spec is a great product, all beacuse you disagree doesn't mean it isn't

I have actual data on my side, though.

Why are you now getting aggressive about this? Thought we were having a nice conversation?

I lost my favourite spec and you are blindly defending it. This was not, and will not, be a nice conversation.

Why does it matter if theres extra melee or not.
Lets say for example there long term goal is 8.0 outlaw is now a range spec, warriors get a 4th spec of spear throwy guy and something else change it doesnt even matter. There is now multiple CLASSES that can change between range and melee.

You brought it up so you tell me.

When there are far more melee choices in the game than ranged choices, the answer is not to add more melee choices and remove ranged choices. That's homogenisation. That's exactly what they said they were putting a stop to in this expansion.

'err but im a hunter/warrior i want to stay X wah wah wah' - thats fine they can do that but the thing is there IS choice. there is potential for range and melee choices, and its not actually about having exactly 12 range and 12 melee dps

I want to be a fully-mobile ranged archer that doesn't focus on a pet. Where's my choice?

But its not a dead end is it, you think it is for some reason.
No one is forcing you to play melee, no one is forcing you to play range either. Blizzard are designing specs they think are themed and fun. Raid composition is a guild choice.

I was forced out of my favourite spec (because it was removed from the game), so this is crap.

And seriously they CAN put the price of the game up to $1000 a month, people will unsub and the game will die or the price will go down, I mean if sub price is your argument to anything you must be really out of ideas or flipping your lid in rage. I also already suggested that if this has traumatised you soooo much (lets be honest you wont unsub), then walk away, take your money and leave them a scathing comment in why they wont get your money anymore that is how a market works.

I have played since early 2005, I can handle a bad expac or two. I unsubscribed over the flying debacle and I resubbed when they backed down on that. I'm confident that they will piss off enough people in Legion to make them reconsider this bullshit their class design team is up to. Eventually Blizzard will have to recognise that team as the weakest link, and the ones who are dragging their name through the mud right now.

[Not A Cat]

I think it's one of the more fun dps specs. I definitely like it more than the other two hunter specs. MM is so boring, hopefully the artifact adds more to it because it's akin to arcane mages right now in terms of its simplicity.

But on another note, I agree there are way too many melee specs. I like demon hunters, but I strongly dislike that blizzard decided to add yet another melee class. Still, I think people are getting a little too ahead of themselves when it comes to survival's place in raiding. Yeah I don't think they'll be viable in mythic, they lack the mobility of their ranged counterparts and don't bring any utility to the raid other than traps. But that's mythic, bring the player AND the class. Normal/Heroic raids are far less complex and require less composition. Yeah you'll find people who disagree, but you'll find there are plenty of guilds who made it through progression just fine without forcing their members to play a certain spec.

[threads]

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.

well enhance and ele had completely different gear for a long time so it was never realistic for someone to swap between.

[Noocta]

well enhance and ele had completely different gear for a long time so it was never realistic for someone to swap between.

I'll also argue that unless Enhance had a niche in a specific fight ( Mythic emperor in Highmaul comes to mind ), mythic guild don't usually take one at all.

[Raelbo]

Switching between magic types as a mage can merely involve switching specs. Hunters couldn't be melee at all for most of their existence. So it actually is a very drastic change for hunters and "lightning mage" is not even close.

Without knowing how the playstyle of a hypothetical lightning spec plays out, your comment is pretty foolish. For example, in D2 lightning mages uses Static Field which required them to get into melee range. Massive difference in playstyle to frost and fire.

Next time you try to be snarky, try to actually make sure that what you are saying.

And you should follow your own advice :P

Uh, what? The same reasons why Survival being melee is a bad idea applies to the notion of Warriors being ranged. That's not a circular argument.

lololol. Read that again. I am literally rolling on the floor here.

A circular argument would be "Whatever Blizzard does is right, because Blizzard doesn't do any wrong", which seems to be something that a lot of current WoW players believe.

While this may be true it's not the argument made.

(see, I can be condescending too)

This is not news. You have been condescending the whole thread. It's about high time people did the same back to you.

When their viewpoint involves screwing over a large fraction of the people playing a class based on an "interesting idea", they are brickheads.

You have yet to prove that making survival melee == "screwing over a large fraction of the people playing a class", making this assertion a strawman.

And the reason you haven't proved it is because it's demonstably false. The fact is that the way this game works in practice, and has for years, is that the vast majority of the playerbase doesn't actually care too much about the differences between between Surv and MM. They go to a forum and see what spec does the most dps and choose that spec. To all intents and purposes hunters have only really had 2 specs at any given point in time.

And don't tell me I am wrong. I have yet to see a raid tier where the number of MM and Surv hunters is even close to each. It's always been a mix of BM and either MM or Surv. But whenever MM is FotM, no one plays Surv, and vice versa. To all intents and purposes they may as well have been one spec.

And I don't presume to speak for everyone: I am on the more popular side here because Survival is a demonstrably unpopular spec. Look at the fucking title of this thread. Survival is the least played spec in HFC in 7.0.

This is completely asinine. Firstly it's a new spec, so it will take time to find its niche. Secondly, the spec is balanced around level 110, so your comment is premature. Thirdly, a spec doesn't have to be hugely popular to warrant its existence. There have been plenty of people in this thread who do enjoy the new Surv spec (fyi I am not one of them). But really, it's only you that is so butthurt about the loss of the extra non-option option that we had with having MM and MM v 2 (aka Surv) in the past.

If it wasn't meant to be an exhaustive list, why did you include a hunter who "once used a knife"?

At least he used a knife....In the original Disney cartoon, the dude didn't even have a bow. Chris Hemsworth's character had an axe as a preference. In other words, these hunter stereotypes' weapon of preference is melee. Which was my point.

Secondly, as I already stated, all I needed to prove was that there is a precedent for the idea of a melee hunter which is not nearly as absurd as the idea of warrior spellcaster or melee mage (and hell, looking at Gandalf in LotR even that has a precedent). In short your entire premise that a melee hunter is silly, is unsubstantiated.

Survival hunters now ONLY have a melee weapon, so a hunter who used both doesn't exactly work in your favour.

Stop cherry picking and consider the comments in context please. Hunters can use either melee or ranged. When they choose to go melee they specialise into the SV mindset. When they choose to go ranged, they specialise into the MM mindset. It's not exactly rocket science...

Survival hunters not only had a core ability taken straight from Sylvanas in Warcraft 3, but they also used poisoned arrows (which Sylvanas used against Arthas in Warcraft 3).

Serpent Sting was available to MM for a long time.

She was also a mobile ranger, like Survival. Marksman is not a mobile ranger

Marksman has always been a mobile ranger. Just because MM prefer to stand still while actually shooting doesn't mean they can't shoot while moving. Besides, if Sylvanas was as mobile as you suggest, why did she stop dpsing when she had to retreat?

doesn't use Shadow attacks, and doesn't use Poison attacks.

Does now, and did in the past.

By your logic, the mere fact that Sylvanas doesn't use traps pretty much destroys your argument anyway.


At this point you're being silly though. You're trying to map Sylvanas to a specific hunter spec by cherry picking certain talents and skills without looking at the basic premise of each of the specialisations. I would have to argue that Sylvanas' lack of a pet and traps immediately places her more in the MM mould than SV which is more the traditional outdoor ranger type (like Aragorn).

Rexxar is more similar to Beast Mastery, and his "type" in Warcraft 3 was Beastmaster.

The point of bringing up Rexxar was two-fold

1) to illustrate the precedent for having a melee hunter in the first place.
2) You were trying to argue that because of SV going melee, a major NPC suddenly was orphaned. What I demonstrated was that not only does Sylvanas actually have an applicable spec (MM) but the SV going melee gives Rexxar a plausible spec.

As for MM and Survival being similar: did MM use Black Arrow? Did Survival use Aimed Shot? Did MM focus on traps? Did Survival focus on hardcasted, heavy-hitters? Did MM have Explosive Shot and Lock and Load? Did Survival have automatic cleave?

Both specs have had their exact flavour altered many times over the years. But essentially they both do exactly the same thing, mobile dps at range. Raid leaders really didn't care about all those little details you are talking about, and quite frankly neither did the majority of playerbase. If they did, then everyone wouldn't simply be picking the one with the highest parses.

You guys always love bringing out the "100% mobile ranged will never be balanced" as if it's a hypothetical, even though a) there was such a thing for 2 expansions and b) they were never better than casters...other than Elemental Shaman, but that's more of a case of them being underpowered (since Blizzard can't help but fuck them over at every turn). And again, in the most recent patch the only 2 that were fully mobile were literally so underpowered that they were not even viable for the whole patch.

So please, tell me more about how game breaking fully-mobile ranged specs are.

You missed the point I was making. Blizzard choosing to not make MM 100% mobile isn't something they were forced to do as a consequence of making SV melee. It was a design choice based on how they wanted their ranged archer type to play. Besides, as I keep saying, because hunters have always chosen the spec with the highest damage output, this line of argument is pretty much irrelevant. It's been a long time since I have seen any SV hunters wandering around Azeroth because MM beat them on the meters. So don't come with this BS that half the hunter population are sore because they loved the distinctive playstyle of SV and now it's ruined. The reality is that most players don't give 2 shits about the subtle differences between MM and SV. They have proven time and again that dps meters matter more. At least this way we can get used to one spec for that role instead of constantly switching based on the FotM.

- - - Updated - - -

"Hey, could you switch to survival? We need more melee in the raid right now"

Yeah, that will totally happen.

It could. Not that I am saying it's likely. But then again I didn't even restrict my argument to that one single scenario. You did that all by yourself. The scenario I was actually considering was more long term, as in a Hunter would be assigned to melee or ranged for an extended period of time, and only really change occasionally as the guild membership changes, typically between raid tiers. You know, like the way a Paladin will choose whether to go tank or heals or dps, or a Shaman will choose whether to be a ranged dps, melee dps or healer.

Also, that "Before Legion" stuff is totally wrong. Patches like 5.4 had very good balance between the three specs and while all of them were different, none of them were hugely different.

Oh really?!? I say this because I have always favoured MM. I was forced to play SV in order to do challenge modes and for heroic Garrosh. I even remember applying for a Garrosh run one night and the RL saying "WTF who the hell still plays MM?"

Of course there are exceptions. There will always be people who stick to a spec because they love the playstyle even though another spec is more effective. I was one such exception. But I can tell you right now, I felt very lonely. Even scrubs doing less dps than me in SV would mock me for choosing MM. In other words, your premise that this massive contingent of hunters are now sad because their favourite spec has been essentially taken away is BS. All Blizzard needed to do was give MM 5% more dps and SV was dead anyway.

At least now there is a possible motive to choose it. Because even though total dps is a concern, melee and ranged dps are actually 2 different roles and really shouldn't be compared to each other. As long as both MM and SV existed as ranged dps options, one of them was always going to be completely overshadowed by the other.

Now, SV is hugely different. So, it's actually Legion that effectly has 2 active hunter specs.

If we assume that SV does end up being such a terrible melee spec that it's not viable, then your argument would hold true. But then we've lost nothing since either MM or SV would have been sidelined anyways.

At least this way there is a the possibility that hunters could have 3 viable specs, and really, that's actually an issue of how the damage output is tuned rather than an inherent property of the concept.

[mistahwilshire]

You'll never see them around unless their damage output is tangibly superior to all melee specs in the game and both ranged hunter specs, or they're given some absolutely insane mandatory utility (lol).

[teverin]

You'll never see them around unless their damage output is tangibly superior to all melee specs in the game and both ranged hunter specs, or they're given some absolutely insane mandatory utility (lol).

I don't even think they would have to superior to all of the specs. If they are close that would be good enough for some people to switch to try something new or because they like the feel of the spec.