Does anyone miss old survival?

[Dadwen]

I miss old survival, My personal favorite be Wotlk. But lets be honestly do you really think blizz will revert changes.

even if 0 people played the current version of survival their ego would not let them revert it I'm guessing.

[xZerocidex]

even if 0 people played the current version of survival their ego would not let them revert it I'm guessing.

Pretty much this unfortunately.

[Firebyrd]

Pretty much this unfortunately.

Yep, which is pretty much the case. Almost no one actually plays SV except to fuck around on WQ, but it's going to stay melee.

[Renixis]

I loved MoP survival but I don't see them returning it to a ranged specialisation for a long long time, if ever.

[threads]

I really like the idea of a melee hunter, going back to the roots of the Survival spec (melee and traps focus)... but I just can't play it, the DPS window + RNG aspect on Mongoose and Fury completely kill it for me

get out of here with this vanilla melee hunter bs it was never a melee spec.

[spinner981]

i dont understand why they couldnt of just added a 4th spec for us if they wanted melee so bad or just revert survival back to being ranged i mean there was no need for it to get changed ((

Definitely. They are so willing to go out of the way to take one druid spec and split it into two, yet for some reason they are reluctant to give hunters a fourth spec so instead they just completely remove one of our specs and replace it with a spec that is absolutely nothing like neither the old spec or the hunter class in general. I feel like a warrior with traps in SV, not a hunter. Probably one of the worst decisions they've ever made regarding the hunter class, and definitely the most teeth-kicking ones.

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even if 0 people played the current version of survival their ego would not let them revert it I'm guessing.

Yup. Blizzard's 'vision' deleted the survival spec and I am guessing their excuse as to why they can't bring it back will be like the excuse they've given us as to why they can't bring back eyes of the beast: "Because it's too hurrd!", or they won't comment on it at all. One of those. Sickens me.

[Canderous1]

i miss survival with the SoO set bonus.. lol>

[Monkeymoo]

even if 0 people played the current version of survival their ego would not let them revert it I'm guessing.

This is what I believe too. They won't admit it was a failure or a horribly stupid idea. They'll just keep wasting time on it.

[Bullettime]

I love the new Survival but they did a pretty piss poor job integrating the old Survival kit into Marks, even as talent options, like they claimed they would. Black Arrow and Explosive Shot are just...off feeling to use with Marksmanship's kit.

[spinner981]

I love the new Survival but they did a pretty piss poor job integrating the old Survival kit into Marks, even as talent options, like they claimed they would. Black Arrow and Explosive Shot are just...off feeling to use with Marksmanship's kit.

They didn't integrate it at all. Explosive shot is a monstrosity of an ability, and is absolutely nothing like what it was. Black arrow is a dot, so hooray for them getting that part right. Apart from that its ticks do nothing but damage and now it summons a minion to attack the enemy for the sole reason of blizzard wanting to give a hunter talent the ability to solo mobs and what not without a pet. Heck, serpent sting, what used to be one of the most iconic hunter abilities in the game, got demoted to a passive dot application talent in the survival tree.

There is no reason why they couldn't just give us a fourth spec. Druids got four specs, and all they did there was split 1 spec into 2. Now hunters lost one of their pre-existing specs for an entirely new spec that we never had that only a tiny portion of the hunter community really wanted. The game is already absolutely chocked full of melee, yet their decision was to remove one of the 3 ranged weapon user specs in the game to add to 12 pre-existing melee DPS specs (18 if you count tanks).

[ydraw]

There's also no reason why they needed to make a melee hunter spec at all. We don't need 4 specs, we need 3 ranged specs. There are already 13 other melee DPS specs in the game that people can play if they want.

[spinner981]

There's also no reason why they needed to make a melee hunter spec at all. We don't need 4 specs, we need 3 ranged specs. There are already 13 other melee DPS specs in the game that people can play if they want.

Yup, especially since pretty much all of the melee gameplay of hunter isn't really all that special or unique. It's like just a generic melee spec but also you have traps and pets and other hunter stuff tacked on.

[Devilyaki]

I miss it yes.

[scorpious1109]

Yes. I miss functional Explosive shot, proccing it with Black Arrow and such, etc.

[Sliske]

4.3 and 5.4 survival where the most fun i had on hunter

[Devilyaki]

If they truly wanted to make a interesting hunter spec they should of had bm become a tank spec :3

[xZerocidex]

I love the new Survival but they did a pretty piss poor job integrating the old Survival kit into Marks, even as talent options, like they claimed they would. Black Arrow and Explosive Shot are just...off feeling to use with Marksmanship's kit.

I just want to know what the hell they were thinking about changing Explosive Shot.

[Bepples]

Definitely. They are so willing to go out of the way to take one druid spec and split it into two, yet for some reason they are reluctant to give hunters a fourth spec so instead they just completely remove one of our specs and replace it with a spec that is absolutely nothing like neither the old spec or the hunter class in general. I feel like a warrior with traps in SV, not a hunter. Probably one of the worst decisions they've ever made regarding the hunter class, and definitely the most teeth-kicking ones.

It is easily the most damaging decision they have ever made to the hunter class.

The primary reason is obvious: it removed the old Survival spec. There's a prevailing myth that the old Survival was perpetually unpopular and underpowered, but that isn't the case. Survival was more of a support role before 3.0, but post-3.0 and especially post-3.1 it took on a pretty unique DoT/Trap-focused theme which saw the spec become decently popular (turns out not many people like support roles), but MM was still more played due to it's better throughput in WotLK and for about half of Cata. For the second half of Cata, Survival overtook MM in a big way, especially as the class trended towards mobility and away from the old caster-lite model. Throughout MoP SV and BM would overtake one another in popularity while MM stayed mostly unpopular. For the first half of WoD BM was king, followed by SV and MM. Both were close, but SV edged out even when considering MM's superior single-target. It wasn't until 6.2 that Survival was kicked to the curb with the infamous "bug-fix" to Serpent Sting, which ended up being one of the largest single nerfs to any spec in WoW history. Playing SV at that point was not an option at any level of PvE content.

TL;DR: Survival has at times been the top Hunter spec, and enjoyed several years as one of the most popular ranged specs in the game. It took CRUSHING nerfs to change that. That's why I called the whole "Survival has always been shit" myth just that: a myth.

But that's not all. Making Survival melee not only killed a previously-popular ranged spec and thus presented a huge middle finger to thousands of hunters, while also appealing to nearly NO ONE thus permanently condemning it to niche status, but it also negatively influenced the other two specs. Basically, Survival fucked you over from beyond the grave. The most obvious example is traps being removed from the other two specs (less relevant now since we have them back in 7.1.5). But it's not just that. Blizzard wanted to redo the whole hunter class in Legion, but Survival required a LOT more attention than the other specs due to the scale of its changes. It ended up leeching most of the developer's attention to the hunter class. This has had a HUGELY negative effect on BM and MM, which is obvious to anyone playing a hunter right now. BM is largely untouched from its early Alpha state and MM is full to the brim of bandaid fixes.

So to recap: Blizzard spent the majority of their Hunter development time making melee Survival work which involved restricting utility to Survival at the expense of the other specs as well as causing the other specs to be left in a severely unfinished state. All that effort resulted in Survival being condemned to niche unpopularity.

That's what makes it the single most damaging change ever to Hunters.

And if any of the Survival fanatics/Blizzard acolytes on this forum want to try to tell me otherwise (and fail, as always), consider this: Can you think of any other class revamp which left much of the class saying "oh well, we just need another revamp to fix it" before it exited the testing phase? Because that was the reality for the 7.0 hunter revamp.

Yup. Blizzard's 'vision' deleted the survival spec and I am guessing their excuse as to why they can't bring it back will be like the excuse they've given us as to why they can't bring back eyes of the beast: "Because it's too hurrd!", or they won't comment on it at all. One of those. Sickens me.

I remember in early WoD when Warlocks were having an issue where Rain of Fire was high on their priority list for Single Target. Blizzard came in and hotfix-nerfed it by a large percentage which would have fixed the issue on its own. However, Blizzard did their usual over-nerfing and also drastically reduced the ember generation of Rain of Fire, which when combined with the damage nerf made it useless for AoE as well. Warlocks, understandably, flipped shit over this. Blizzard admitted the next day that it was a mistake, but refused to revert the change because "it would be too big a gameplay change to make in a hotfix". The day after making the change in the first place.

Blizzard is perfectly capable of reaching the cognitive dissonance necessary to never admit fault to everything. Celestalon also thinks the idea of Survival was not "sold" to the players well enough at the start of Legion. Translation: "we didn't fuck up with Survival, we made a great spec but the players were too dumb to understand its greatness themselves and we didn't help them out". This is the same sort of pathetic deflection that EA uses regularly to shift blame away from themselves in the event of a catastrophe like Sims 4.

So yeah, they will due their usual strategy of 80% silence, 20% deflection of blame to the players that they do for EVERYTHING these days. The cowardice of Chadd Nervig, Brian Holinka, Tom Chilton, Ion Hazzikostas, Cory Stockton, etc. is pretty sickening indeed.

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I love the new Survival but they did a pretty piss poor job integrating the old Survival kit into Marks, even as talent options, like they claimed they would. Black Arrow and Explosive Shot are just...off feeling to use with Marksmanship's kit.

No amount of "integration" will work because they would still be using Vulnerable and they would still be hardcasting Aimed Shot, both of which preclude any sort of comparison to 3.0-6.2 Survival.

The Survival of old needs to be it's own spec, one way or another.

Some people suggest 4 specs. I was previously in favour of that but after seeing the amount of people who actually main Survival right now, there's just no point to devoting the extra resources required to maintain 4 specs. Melee survival must go.

[Wallmaker Yahzarah]

I miss being able to use both my bow and 2H/dual 1H'rs to gimp foos down. But I would honestly not want to have that experience with all this ridiculous dmg and anti-cc that melee classes have now.

[Ragingheadache]

4.3 and 5.4 survival where the most fun i had on hunter

Same here. I did persist with survival during 7.0 but once I got to 100 and found what a paid in the backside it was to play in HCs I dropped it for BM, but even then that is just dull hence why I've picked up my paladin & shaman characters.