Overall, was Survival a failure?

[Runefeather]

Honestly i don't understand the hate. Survival actually brings something new to the table (ie. a melee pet class), and yeah I know DK technically is a melee pet class but the whole fantasy is different.

[Bepples]

I understand your point of view. Back a few years ago, i used to play hunter, and to be honest, i always liked survival more then MM, i mean explosive shot was cool, black arrow and so on!
But sadly, MM was the 80% of time superior to survival in terms of dps. And sadly we know that majority of people tend to switch to the most dps spec. In the end, ranged survival was surely different from MM, but overall had less audience, and often even less then BM.
Now i understand what Blizzard did with survival (now i will use random numbers):"We have a spec used by 10% of hunter players. It's almost impossible to balance 3 ranged spec. We have a 8% of player audience that wuold like to try a melee hunter. Let's switch survival to a melee spec. If we are lucky, this will bring that 8% and maybe some more, if we are unlucky, survival just lost a 2% audience, and they can still choose between MM and BM".
Now i agree with you that this move was a failure, at least number wise (but i still think that if Survival was topping the charts, the population wuold rise a lot).

Um, no.

Survival was consistently more popular than MM. 6.2 is the first exception since WotLK.



Nothing more to say than that, really. Unbelievably misinformed an ignorant post.

If you (not you personally maybe but hunter community) don't want to play melee hunter then don't beg Blizzard for Rexxar spec. Personally I saw "Wahhh I wanna play Rexxar QQQQ Blizzz do something QQQQ" threads since early wotlk. And these treads were popular. You got what you asked. Now you QQ that you don't like melee spec? Seriously?

a) Clearly the tiny minority of players who actually supported melee Survival on the forums over the years were not the same people now decrying it
b) emphasis on the tiny minority part: it's the least played spec now and a google search for "world of warcraft melee hunter" with a limit of July 2015 (before legion was announced) yields about 10 threads on the first 2 pages, most of which are 1 page. The only one that was above 10 pages was a wowhead thread (http://www.wowhead.com/forums&topic=144816), where most of the posts were negative regarding the concept. So the claim that there was large community support for it and the community got what they asked for is dubious at best.

If you are going to act like a smart ass, remember the "smart" part.

[Deleted]

dont even try to argue with those guys.

they don't understand that hunter has been a range specc since day 1. (and that pretty much nobody was asking for a meele version)
They like survivial and they feel hurt on the inside if you tell them meele-sv is an unwanted spec.

this is what most discussion have come to nowadays. (feelings > facts)

what they could have done is make survival an axethrowing specc with an utility based kit. (max range 20 yards or something like that) Like the survival from tbc when you applied debuffs so your group deals more damage

[Deleted]

Um, no.

Survival was consistently more popular than MM. 6.2 is the first exception since WotLK.



Nothing more to say than that, really. Unbelievably misinformed an ignorant post.



a) Clearly the tiny minority of players who actually supported melee Survival on the forums over the years were not the same people now decrying it
b) emphasis on the tiny minority part: it's the least played spec now and a google search for "world of warcraft melee hunter" with a limit of July 2015 (before legion was announced) yields about 10 threads on the first 2 pages, most of which are 1 page. The only one that was above 10 pages was a wowhead thread (http://www.wowhead.com/forums&topic=144816), where most of the posts were negative regarding the concept. So the claim that there was large community support for it and the community got what they asked for is dubious at best.

If you are going to act like a smart ass, remember the "smart" part.

Well i try to be kind and I EVEN AGREE ON YOU with the failure, but you are arrogant for no reason at all.

You know what? In the end Blizzard decide everything, they want survival melee and you just have to deal with it.

[Deleted]

I always hated hunter..(feels so lame and easy to go from a long range with a pet)
now that melee hunter is viable.. it is quite unique.

the main reason everybody whines is because surv was so damn good in pve and pvp..
nobody forces you to play it, but if they boost its damage, everybody will.

Like somebody else said in this threat: if they boosted survival dmg so much, it would be like the frost dk chain of ice spamming bullshit in wotlk (and everybody played it)

I'd love to see what blizzard will change cause of all the whiners who cant accept change.
as for me, whatever they do, I love it as long as it stays melee(and hooray for its 'complexity')

made an account just to write this down..

[Deleted]

You dont need to compare it to the other Hunter specs at all. Just need to look at it for what it is, the amount of play the spec gets, and the interest in the spec being melee. If youre going to compare it to anything, you would compare it to what Survival was and how it changed for the worse or better.

And who will judge if it worse or better? Those who had been hating it already when it was only announced? Or those who just ignore it because "I play only ranged"?
Hunter has another two ranged specs to choose from. I can't see no problem here.
Survival was fun as ranged and it is fun as melee. They should do something with MM/BM to make them fun too not boring.

Survival never was top raid dps spec and it is not now but needs some tweaking to put out dmg easier and bit higher. That's for another patches.
In Arena is just awesome and ton of fun.

Blizzard won't change it back anyway so this constant complaining is unnecessary and sorry, childish.

I'm looking forward for future tuning because that is what Blizz will do to make it more tempting at least for players who don't feel so betrayed.
What a drama, really.

[Bepples]

Well i try to be kind and I EVEN AGREE ON YOU with the failure, but you are arrogant for no reason at all.

You know what? In the end Blizzard decide everything, they want survival melee and you just have to deal with it.

Not my fault you decided to make shit up.

I always hated hunter..(feels so lame and easy to go from a long range with a pet)
now that melee hunter is viable.. it is quite unique.

Further proof that the change to survival was made for people who didn't play hunters.

[Deleted]

Do you think it was awesome and brave for people who's favourite spec was the ranged Survival from 3.0-6.2?



This just reeks of ignorance of the real issue. Enhancement has been melee since the beginning, so people come to the shaman class with the expectation that there's a ranged and a melee spec. Hunters have never been melee (unless you count the early melee/ranged survival in vanilla that no one cared about), so everyone who came to the class came to play a ranged class. That means Survival has no audience besides a tiny niche of players who thought it would be a mildly interesting idea to have a melee hunter.

Actually ignorance is not to respect Blizzard's decision about it which was announced many months ago.
They had reason for it, they did it.

- - - Updated - - -

Not my fault you decided to make shit up.



Further proof that the change to survival was made for people who didn't play hunters.

You just cannot accept that someone who played survival/mm/bm ranged play survival melee now as well. And actually enjoying it. Too bad but you won't change anything with this denial.

[Sci Fi Samurai]

I can sympathize with people who liked it more before, but tbh I liked that it reverted to melee. I rolled my hunter back in vanilla and played with a survival/BM spec and had a lot of fun with it. I didn't raid with it, but I quested and did BG's/world pvp with it and had fun.

When LK turned the spec into Marks 2.0 that shot bear traps that shot snakes at people it died for me thematically and mechanically. I shelved the character until Lone Wolf came out in WoD and decided to try that out. It was ok, but I shelved the character again shortly after for the same issues.

I'm enjoying it now. I expect it to have some rough spots, but mechanically and thematically I'm enjoying it.

[Bepples]

Actually ignorance is not to respect Blizzard's decision about it which was announced many months ago.
They had reason for it, they did it.

When they announced it has no bearing on whether or not it deserves respect, nor does it have a bearing on

Shitty decisions do not deserve respect. I know their reasoning, and it's bad reasoning. The in-game outcome of Survival proves this. This honestly reads like a childish "no, you" sort of insult made because you couldn't come up with anything better.

How far up Blizzard's ass do you have to be to think they deserve respect automatically? Toxic fanboyism at it's finest.

You just cannot accept that someone who played survival/mm/bm ranged play survival melee now as well. And actually enjoying it. Too bad but you won't change anything with this denial.

Some do. Most don't. Extent matters, and hardly anyone is playing Survival. Most of the people on these forum threads who pipe up with their worthless pro-survival opinions and weak defenses did not previously play a hunter, or merely played one as an alt. This just proves that Blizzard's over-all hunter design in Legion was not aimed at serving the class's core audience. They carved up every spec and reduced their effectiveness and flavour. They forcibly replaced the old survival after a year of it being unplayably tuned with an unwelcome playstyle. Hell, they even handed out stuff to other classes: Demon Hunters are now the "mobility class", and they and Elemental Shamans get a BETTER form of disengage.

The true denial in this thread is pretending that Survival wasn't a failure because they can point to a small number of players for which it was a success. Those people aren't very smart because they do not grasp the fact that on ANY issue you will have a non-zero amount of people on both sides. They could literally make a spec which cast an ability that had one ability: a three-second cooldown which does 1 million damage with a 40 yard range. That's 333k DPS, which is respectable. You would honest-to-god have people defending this, claiming that it's a "bold new direction", and that you need to respect Blizzard's decision. Watcher would argue that people just don't like the spec because of initial negative reception, and that the players are just misled and they would like it if they tried it (this is his ACTUAL STANCE on brewmaster monks right now). Celestalon would argue that it's not a resource capped spec and that a spec needs to be either resource-capped with downtime, or GCD-capped with no resource concern (his actual stance on BM vs MM). Holinka would probably just block you on twitter.

But, in that hypothetical situation, you would ABSOLUTELY have threads like these. People like you would feign ignorance, pretending that it isn't one of the game's most least popular specs. You would point to the few players who do play it and like it, claiming that based on that alone it would be a success. Whenever someone used the obviously-hyperbolic point "no one plays this spec", you would quip back with the smug "oh well I do, and that's at least 1 person", because you would undoubtedly think that calling out a clear hyperbole counts as a witty counter-argument instead of just immature desperation.

On ANY issue, no matter how one-sided it may be, you will have people on both sides. You could delete a class from the game, and in the endless forum shitstorm that would inevitably follow, you would have the occasional Blizzard acolyte ranting that people are just afraid of change and Blizzard is practicing the "addition by subtraction" approach to development (again, another commonly-used stance). Survival is a hugely unpopular spec, but you are patting yourself on the back because you found the small group of players standing for it, ignoring the much, much, much larger group of players standing against it.

THAT is true denial.

[Deleted]

I think Surv was just supesed to be pvp not pve , its a new spec so maybe they will still work on it and increase the damage

[Deleted]

I've never wanted to be a melee hunter.
I do think it's encouraging that Blizzard are willing to make such an experimental change.
I just don't like it personally.

On the whole I'd say it's a failure. Of all the hunters I speak to only 1 has actively played it. I've never seen one in an instance and from the threads I've read it seems to be disliked by the majority.

Sure some people will like it, but some people like some really odd crap. And some people like things just because other people don't. Fuckin edgelords.

[TyloBedo]

Um, no.

Survival was consistently more popular than MM. 6.2 is the first exception since WotLK.



Nothing more to say than that, really. Unbelievably misinformed an ignorant post.

That graph shows data for heroic raiding (small group of players) for one patch of cata and all of mop. I can say fairly confidently that for at least patch 4.2, and I'm pretty sure 4.0-4.1, MM was more played spec.

[Bepples]

That graph shows data for heroic raiding (small group of players) for one patch of cata and all of mop. I can say fairly confidently that for at least patch 4.2, and I'm pretty sure 4.0-4.1, MM was more played spec.

Original post:

MM was the 80% of time superior to survival in terms of dps.

Still wrong.

[Kwaai]

If you (not you personally maybe but hunter community) don't want to play melee hunter then don't beg Blizzard for Rexxar spec. Personally I saw "Wahhh I wanna play Rexxar QQQQ Blizzz do something QQQQ" threads since early wotlk. And these treads were popular. You got what you asked. Now you QQ that you don't like melee spec? Seriously?

If the threads were so popular, why aren't people playing the spec?

The hunter was always based on the D&D Ranger class which can be both ranged and melee - Rexxar was always exclusively melee (aside from Hearthstone), the Survival hunter is in part based on Rexxar (although he is referred to as a Beastmaster... go figure).

And the WoW Hunter has been ranged for a decade.

Well i try to be kind and I EVEN AGREE ON YOU with the failure, but you are arrogant for no reason at all.

You know what? In the end Blizzard decide everything, they want survival melee and you just have to deal with it.

The argument isn't "does blizz have the right to change SV," it's "was SV a failure." Whether or not we have to live with it doesn't matter. If they fucked up that's something to discuss.

[xZerocidex]

Ppl should really ask themselves why Blizz decided to change Rexxar from BM to SV.

You can make 3 specs that involve wielding a bow have a different playstyle. We got 3 rogue specs that involves being in someone face just like we got mages that have 3 specs hurling spells at ppl.

So what's the issue with Hunters having 3 range specs? MM was the physical damage dealer spec and SV was the magical damage dealer spec

[Tenant]

I think there is some mixup here, Rexxar is a Survivalist hunter - he prefers to be in the wilderness and prefer animals over people, the beastmaster thing is more a name for him because he has an affinity for beasts. Thematically it fits perfectly.

I think it's all stupid trying to pin most of the major NPC's down to one spec. The characters have never followed the strict rules/design of their respective class's specializations (never mind the fact the gameplay of the specs are always changing...). You can surely label them (as they already have with Order Hall champion system), but they've always been allowed to break the rules. Just because the game calls Rexxar a Survival Hunter doesn't mean he's any less a Beast Master.

[TyloBedo]

Original post:



Still wrong.

Okay, but you're showing a graph that spans less than 20% of wow's time frame. I'm not saying either of you are right or wrong but you can't disprove his claim with that graph.

[Goochy]

When Survival was first truly buffed and made into a viable raiding spec (sometime in early WOTLK i believe), I switched over to it. I truly enjoyed playing the hunter the most from WOTLK through the end of Cata. I miss those days quite much, especially considering where the spec has currently found itself.

[Gurg]

Sadly.. i have come to the point in admitting that new survival, if Devs go trough with the changes that they have in mind, will be failure.
As someone who mained survival, put effort, time and money (cant play for free) i feel disappointed to the point that i have to admit that it was time taken from my life that i will never get back.
Im pretty much quoting my self from another topic here cause.. well theres not much to say any more:

New Changes... They are removing Improved Traps (50% reduced CD on Explosive trap) and putting shite talent that boosts our new passive even further.
The issue that im afraid of, and i presume most of survivals reading this, is that new passive (after 2sec not being triggered trap is fully armed and gains extra effect) will NOT work in any form of group content.
New passives extra effect for Explosive Trap is +50% damage buff, on top of that, new talent that replaced Improved Traps boosts this effect for 200% more damage.
Why will not work? Well.. Why would tanks move ANYTHING, especially bosses, just for you, potentially risking some unwanted attack hitting group while doing so? Or what about stationary bosses like Wrath of Azshara, Helya and such?

Were still talking about content that will be competitive trough expansion like mythic+ runs. With this logic and new version of Survival their value by its defaults is destroyed in atleast two dungeons, Maw of Souls and Eye of Azshara, and any form of Trial of Valor raid, and thats just from top of my mind and not counting in for future Legion content.