why is no one playing survival. its insanely strong right now

[Nyel]

I very much enjoyed Survival in Legion. It was great to play and a lot of fun, although it was middle tier DPS. Without a proper artifact weapon in BfA it just didn't feel right anymore, the gameplay was still good. The same in Shadowlands.

I think it's by far the most complex and fun Hunter spec, unfortunately it's good such a bad reputation that many won't even try it out. I love the trap / explosives playstyle and I never understood the issues some have with a melee hunter spec.

[sunxsera]

Because ... most hunters dont like to play melee. Or because SV is just a melee BM version without a real identity. Nothing is unique.
"hey! Let me throw some grenades right infront of my face and on my pet!"

I dont know, i see so many people post "survival is awesome" ... "it`s my fav spac" .. but in reality, ingame, i never ever see survival hunters.

Don ' t get me wrong, i`d love to have an awesome 3rd spec for hunter - but sv`s design is just meh.

[Boricha]

There's too many melee specs already, and hunter has a ranged option that brings all the same utility. Surv's damage would have to be the best in the game by a huge margin to become high-end meta.

[Bepples]

If you think mythic raiders wouldn't stack SVs in their melee slots just like they stack arms warriors when it would yield good results, then I don't know what you are smoking.
A lot of high end raiders actually like the SV playstyle as well from what I've heard and seen from streams and statements (although at least *that* is just selective evidence), they would stack 10 hunters (split among range and melee depending on what they need) if that would be the viable way to go due to imbalance and raid design.

I mean, sure: if SV were buffed to stupid levels where it outdamaged everything else by a massive margin then it would get stacked in raids. That's true for any iteration of any spec ever, though, so that's not a useful hypothetical. The fact that we apparently need SV to thoroughly outclass everything in order to be considered for raiding suggests there are deeper problems with the spec than performance.

Ranged SV at times had similar performance levels to melee SV right now; it never reached completely abandoned status, however, until it was something like 20% behind. It was usually a popular spec even when it wasn't necessarily the best one.

It absolutely baffles me that you think SV performs just as well as BM/MM in raids...... just because bloodmallet lists them as relatively equal DPS in a patchwerk fight or something? There are so many mechanics that you simply can't properly do as SV compared to MM/BM. Even simple shit like carrying the orb out for ner'zhul, or walking the runes on Fatescribe.

I'm basing it off rankings that show a devoted SV Hunter can at least hold a candle to the other specs. Remember; most skilled and geared Hunters are playing BM and MM so that will of course skew the logs. The few that stick to Survival have still been able to put out respectable performance, and the spec's performance is actually very good in M+.

Survival's in one of the best numerical positions it's seen for a long time, and it's seen good ones before. It's not like this spec has been D-tier every tier since Legion launched.

These cutting edge people, in general, don't care about this "SV was once a range spec" crybaby bullshit.

I've seen cutting-edge raiders and even popular WoW PvE personalities say ranged SV shouldn't have been removed, so evidently it is something that people care about. Bellular, Preach, and LimitMax have all spoken along those lines despite all of them having given SV a chance, and on the Hunter discord this has come up a lot.

But it's never been the case that SV is like a top-performing spec as you make it out to be - in an eviroment where every bit matters, it's not even "good"

I'm not saying SV is a top-performing a spec. I'm saying its performance doesn't adequately explain its unpopularity.

In 6.2 it was clear why ranged SV was so unpopular: it had a damage level more appropriate for a tank spec and was lookingh at something like -20% v.s. MM and -40% v.s. Arcane AFTER the blanket +25% buffs in the 6.2 hotfixes. Being SV instead of MM would genuinely be a major blow to your group's ability to kill the bosses. That's not what SV is now yet it's extremely unpopular anyway.

P.S. Yes: being melee puts SV at a disadvantage v.s. BM and MM. I know that very well. The difference is I correctly identify that as another reason why it shouldn't be melee in a class with 2 capable ranged specs and a central theme built around ranged weapons, whereas you apparently think it amounts to some sort of excuse that makes it all fine.

Isn't it funny that the only unique strength of msv compared to other melee is... ability to dish out high % of its dmg while not in melee?
Kinda hilarious if you would ask me.

Yes; even in its melee years it can't escape the class's ranged nature. According to melee brain SV is good because of its ranged capability but somehow if it were fully ranged it would be bad.

It absolutely is harder to play melee, especially for Hunter which is also the easiest range DPS.

You act like no Hunter has ever played a melee class.

"Is Survival a bad spec? No, it's the entire Hunter playerbase that's wrong!"

Yes, MM was the mainstream hunter in vanilla and BC. BM mainly just for china farmer.
SV was the best on high item level. All progress hunter played MM/SV to get the agi buff from the SV. For PvP => MM just to scattershot and then max SV.

No, that's still not true. MM was the best raiding spec throughout Classic. Once BC launched BM was the best raiding spec for the entire expansion. SV's usefulness was entirely up to its Expose Weakness talent. MM in BC was largely useless in PvE; it was a PvP option that expansion and that's it. Most PvP Hunters were either playing BM or MM focused builds (if at all because Hunters were actually pretty bad in rated PvP during BC and were the lowest-represented class).

The main thing is the playstyle, using both melee and range(all weapons are hunter weapons, hehe). If you like this style of gameplay you had to play SV now. If they would change SV from melee to range only like the other specs ... oh hell boring dotlock style again ... no never plz. don't .. so just stoping asking for this.

I know you might like to fantasise about the melee + ranged weapon all day but the most popular iterations of SV by far were the ones built around the ranged weapon with Explosive Shot.

In any case if you like using both melee and ranged weapons SV right now is still not a good fit because you can't get a ranged weapon. The closest you can get is an animation-only crossbow for a couple of the abilities and that doesn't even come close to representing Classic/BC gameplay.

Try one week SV, you wan't play MM or BM again. SV is so much faster and stronger also in each open world situation compared to a MM or BM. Try ... you will love it.

You act like no one ever tried the spec.

This open world claim is ridiculous anyway; while it may be faster than MM (purely due to MM's reliance on hardcasting), BM is by far a better spec for the open world. It requires minimal setup for its DPS, is a fully capable mobile ranged DPS that never has to stop moving, and most importantly: most of its damage especially in AoE is from its pet. That's important not only for threat but also because Ferocity gives the Hunter and the pet +10% leech meaning Ferocity pets get huge amounts of healing while doing damage, meaning BM is capable of handling much larger pulls than SV. Shadowlands bridged the gap to some extent by AoE-capping Beast Cleave while leaving Wildfire Bomb uncapped but it's nowhere near enough to make SV preferable. On top of all this BM's PvP talents are some of the best in the game for speed-leveling (Dire Beast: Hawk is incredible for solo content) while SV's PvP talents are largely useless for leveling.

There's a very good reason why every speed-leveling Hunter played BM. The only arguments SV Hunters put forward are:

- AoE cap: SV has uncapped AoE, but like I said it can't hold up on big pulls (i.e. >10) as well as BM can due to BM's unmatched pet tanking
- Harpoon resetting on kills; this is great for melee players but what they forget is BM is a ranged spec and doesn't need to close the cap and single-target down enemies 1 by 1 anyway so this isn't the advantage they think it is

I never understood the issues some have with a melee hunter spec.

What's so hard for you to understand? There are tons of threads like this one full of people explaining why they have issues with Survival. To put it simply: Hunters have always been a class based around ranged weapons and as of Legion Survival lacks one. People who like Hunters generally like ranged weapons so they stick to BM and MM, and people who like melee tend to stick to the 12 other melee options in the game including every DPS spec added post-launch. There's a minimal audience for SV right out of the gate and ultimately it's a melee spec up against 2 capable ranged specs in the same class. It's doomed to failure from the start.

I dont know, i see so many people post "survival is awesome" ... "it`s my fav spac" .. but in reality, ingame, i never ever see survival hunters.

Because Survival is such a niche spec it encourages a highly defensive mentality. Fans of the spec feel obligated to try to bring in as many people as possible by overselling it and pushing it anywhere they can while also fiercely defending the spec from its detractors.

[Segus1992]

You act like no Hunter has ever played a melee class.

"Is Survival a bad spec? No, it's the entire Hunter playerbase that's wrong!"

It's a good melee spec, I personally play Hunter just for Survival but can't bring myself to main a class just for one spec. Plus a ton of people in this thread alone say the problem with Survival is that it's melee.

[Nyel]

What's so hard for you to understand? There are tons of threads like this one full of people explaining why they have issues with Survival. To put it simply: Hunters have always been a class based around ranged weapons and as of Legion Survival lacks one. People who like Hunters generally like ranged weapons so they stick to BM and MM, and people who like melee tend to stick to the 12 other melee options in the game including every DPS spec added post-launch. There's a minimal audience for SV right out of the gate and ultimately it's a melee spec up against 2 capable ranged specs in the same class. It's doomed to failure from the start..

There are two ranged spec for Hunters. More than enough. It's only doomed when it's undertuned. I never played Hunter really until they made Survival melee. That's where I played and enjoyed Hunter the most. Just for the record that players play it for the ranged specs. Yes, most do. But you still have two capable ranged specs left for that.

[Bepples]

I personally play Hunter just for Survival but can't bring myself to main a class just for one spec.

I never played Hunter really until they made Survival melee.

"I don't understand why Hunters don't like Survival "

...

"Yeah I really don't like the Hunter class and I'm glad they made one of the specs melee. Hunters can have fun with their remaining 2 specs!"

Has anyone ever told you guys you come across as out of touch?

[KrayZ33]

Because Survival is such a niche spec it encourages a highly defensive mentality. Fans of the spec feel obligated to try to bring in as many people as possible by overselling it and pushing it anywhere they can while also fiercely defending the spec from its detractors.

No, it's because this forum doesn't represent the playerbase in the slightest, in any way whatsoever. Wether it's pro SV or contra, whatever you read here is just one guy stating something out of hundreds of thousands who all think differently.

Me, as a hunter only player since late vanilla, thinks SV is currently the most fun to play spec.
in WoD, SV was also the most fun to play spec but it was RSV back then
in Legion, it was MM.
BM was at it's best in WoD as well.

To me, this is no different to how "my Legion MM" got destroyed in BFA/Shadowlands, but you don't see me being so aggressive about it.
I guess I'm out of touch as well, but I still feel like people are being crybabies about this whole thing and I can understand why some people can't relate to you guys.

Tbh, I think I'm looking at this way more objectively than most people here, including RSV-pushers.
But then again, I really don't give much of a damn.

[glowpipe]

The way the game is currently being played with the logging minigame and meterwhoring, if survival was "insanely strong" all the fotm rerollers would currently be playing survival, all the top end mythic hunters would be playing survival. But they aren't. SV is bottom of the logs because its bad, not because people don't play it. Because people would play it if it was good

[Queen of Hamsters]

I'm currently getting stuck in and leveling Heritage races to max for their sets, and I see plenty of SV hunters at low level in dungeons. My 2 hunters currently leveling have been SV from the start.

SV is awesome for fun on my own, but for endgame, coordinated content I am and forever will be a ranged person. I so, SO wish they'd kept SV as it was during SoO.

[Donkeywing]

I guess I'm out of touch as well, but I still feel like people are being crybabies about this whole thing and I can understand why some people can't relate to you guys..

All you have to do is make a thread on mage forum/discord, show them gandalf/saruman/warhammer mages fighting in melee combat and call for a random mage spec to be turned into melee. Reactions would be very predictable. Everyone knows sv hunter has been a disgrace to the class. Good for you if you enjoy it with the 100 hunters playing it.

Also ppl are looking at logs for representation, but the wowhead covenant split for each spec they did in 9.0 was faaar more revealing than anything else I've ever seen. Sv is barely fucking played and has never been popular. This was very likely to happen the moment they turned SV into melee. Ppl seriously bitching about the incompetence of devs nowadays but really it started a while ago.

[KrayZ33]

All you have to do is make a thread on mage forum/discord, show them gandalf/saruman/warhammer mages fighting in melee combat and call for a random mage spec to be turned into melee. Reactions would be very predictable. Everyone knows sv hunter has been a disgrace to the class. Good for you if you enjoy it with the 100 hunters playing it.

For some people, it's more of a thing of "not wanting" to enjoy something no matter if it's actually good/bad
The choice of words, such as "a disgrace to the class", speaks volumes.
It's exactly that kind of exaggeration I'm talking about

[Bigcountry11782]

There are way better melee for the job than survival and who would being a melee hunter when they can have a better spec and ranged.

[OokOok]

People play a hunter because they like the concept of shooting stuff with a bow from a far.

Why don't more play survival? because it's melee? I mean isn't that obvious? Anyone who likes melee is playing classes/specs that were designed for melee and not just thrown together to appease a minority who clearly also didn't even want to play a melee hunter.

[keyone01]

Just for the record that players play it for the ranged specs. Yes, most do. But you still have two capable ranged specs left for that.

Not really, due to sinking resources to msv reworks ranged specs are neglected and it shows.
Also, it's doomed when it's overtuned too - see uldir or method guldan mythic world 2nd (could argue that is was due to that, exorcus wasn't trolling :P )

[Segus1992]

"I don't understand why Hunters don't like Survival "

...

"Yeah I really don't like the Hunter class and I'm glad they made one of the specs melee. Hunters can have fun with their remaining 2 specs!"

Has anyone ever told you guys you come across as out of touch?

Out of touch because of my opinion about a class? Taking "being offended because of nothing" to a whole new level aren't we?

I generally prefer melee because I find range too easy. Survival is a good melee. It's neither a complex nor an offensive standpoint.

[Nessa-fm]

No, that's still not true. MM was the best raiding spec throughout Classic. Once BC launched BM was the best raiding spec for the entire expansion. SV's usefulness was entirely up to its Expose Weakness talent. MM in BC was largely useless in PvE; it was a PvP option that expansion and that's it. Most PvP Hunters were either playing BM or MM focused builds (if at all because Hunters were actually pretty bad in rated PvP during BC and were the lowest-represented class).

Jesus and here we are, the reason I never write in forum …
Vanilla MM sucks on high Itemlevel, trust me I had /played more over one year after two years vanilla. But if you like go ahead explain way should flat 5% range damage and a sticky AP true shot aura be better then at least 3% crit and 15% agi?

I know you might like to fantasise about the melee + ranged weapon all day but the most popular iterations of SV by far were the ones built around the ranged weapon with Explosive Shot.

Next SV a ranged build around the exploshot? WTF … had you choose the dark arrow I would my agree … but explo? The first SV fantasy was melee with pet, it was there in the wow beta and on the release day, no explo … this was wotlk.

In any case if you like using both melee and ranged weapons SV right now is still not a good fit because you can't get a ranged weapon. The closest you can get is an animation-only crossbow for a couple of the abilities and that doesn't even come close to representing Classic/BC gameplay.

You can use a bow/gun also as SV and you will be able to use all zour abilitys just no wingclip, raptor, butcher ... but you can use arkanshot and slowshot. Isn't fun? I use a weapon swap makro in the open world and BGs. It so funy scare the people with a bow and when the other player came to close put out the big two hander.

You act like no one ever tried the spec.

This open world claim is ridiculous anyway; while it may be faster than MM (purely due to MM's reliance on hardcasting), BM is by far a better spec for the open world. It requires minimal setup for its DPS, is a fully capable mobile ranged DPS that never has to stop moving, and most importantly: most of its damage especially in AoE is from its pet. That's important not only for threat but also because Ferocity gives the Hunter and the pet +10% leech meaning Ferocity pets get huge amounts of healing while doing damage, meaning BM is capable of handling much larger pulls than SV. Shadowlands bridged the gap to some extent by AoE-capping Beast Cleave while leaving Wildfire Bomb uncapped but it's nowhere near enough to make SV preferable. On top of all this BM's PvP talents are some of the best in the game for speed-leveling (Dire Beast: Hawk is incredible for solo content) while SV's PvP talents are largely useless for leveling.

There's a very good reason why every speed-leveling Hunter played BM. The only arguments SV Hunters put forward are:

- AoE cap: SV has uncapped AoE, but like I said it can't hold up on big pulls (i.e. >10) as well as BM can due to BM's unmatched pet tanking
- Harpoon resetting on kills; this is great for melee players but what they forget is BM is a ranged spec and doesn't need to close the cap and single-target down enemies 1 by 1 anyway so this isn't the advantage they think it is

What's so hard for you to understand? There are tons of threads like this one full of people explaining why they have issues with Survival. To put it simply: Hunters have always been a class based around ranged weapons and as of Legion Survival lacks one. People who like Hunters generally like ranged weapons so they stick to BM and MM, and people who like melee tend to stick to the 12 other melee options in the game including every DPS spec added post-launch. There's a minimal audience for SV right out of the gate and ultimately it's a melee spec up against 2 capable ranged specs in the same class. It's doomed to failure from the start.


Because Survival is such a niche spec it encourages a highly defensive mentality. Fans of the spec feel obligated to try to bring in as many people as possible by overselling it and pushing it anywhere they can while also fiercely defending the spec from its detractors.

Back to topic and back to current content, no body cares about what was 15 years ago. So MM or BM better in open world then the SV? Jesus I got belly pain from laughing. But OK, try to pull 20 npc as MM,BM and SV kill all and repeat. As MM you will de anyway, maybe you can use nf or cy CD to hardly manage this, same with the BM. As sv it is so easy just pull, root and bomb all dead in 3 sec without use of any CD. It is awesome … Or you can use the harpoon and jump from one mob to another, killing the target mob during the fly to him this as style no other class had this. Speedleveling with BM is just because of the leak of gear … that’s all.

What is so hard to understand for you? There are tons of people how like the survival hunter and are able to play. So just stop blaming the sv, this is a powerful fun spec with a very good gameplay, complexity and fantasy behind.

We could be happy that the SV is not another range spec, because people how like to play MM are not feeling forced to swap to SV for any reason like 5% more damage for on patch and then spec back again to MM how had for one patch the nose ahead .. Blabla this sucks. Blizzard make this great decision gameplay focused, this is really good.

Yes … I like to see more range ability and more big hits from the raptor. They are allways to low ... last time a DK grab me back, ... zack 15k Raptor in the face finished this. Jesus what a fun as SV.

I wanted to add a image from the first hunter ... but it seems to be not allowed. So feel free to google and you will found plenty stoneage images with hunters using melee weapons like pike and harpoon. hehehe

[Bodakane]

Because ... most hunters dont like to play melee. Or because SV is just a melee BM version without a real identity. Nothing is unique.
"hey! Let me throw some grenades right infront of my face and on my pet!"

I dont know, i see so many people post "survival is awesome" ... "it`s my fav spac" .. but in reality, ingame, i never ever see survival hunters.

Don ' t get me wrong, i`d love to have an awesome 3rd spec for hunter - but sv`s design is just meh.

It plays nothing like BM.

Look, if you don't like melee, then i get it, but acting like its just like BM or somehow shit overall, just simply isn't true.

- - - Updated - - -

All you have to do is make a thread on mage forum/discord, show them gandalf/saruman/warhammer mages fighting in melee combat and call for a random mage spec to be turned into melee. Reactions would be very predictable. Everyone knows sv hunter has been a disgrace to the class. Good for you if you enjoy it with the 100 hunters playing it.

Also ppl are looking at logs for representation, but the wowhead covenant split for each spec they did in 9.0 was faaar more revealing than anything else I've ever seen. Sv is barely fucking played and has never been popular. This was very likely to happen the moment they turned SV into melee. Ppl seriously bitching about the incompetence of devs nowadays but really it started a while ago.

Showing how other people would be unnecessarily negative over a similar event, doesn't justify being unnecessarily negative over this.

- - - Updated - - -

The other thing that annoys me is the claim people who play hunters do so because they like range. They are ignoring that just as many people play hunter because they like the pet aspect. I was never drawn to hunter because of ranged play, I was drawn to it because of the taming and using of pets. In fact, my biggest complaint about SV right now is there's so many BM only pets. Spirit beasts should be the only pet SV can't use.

[Bepples]

No, it's because this forum doesn't represent the playerbase in the slightest, in any way whatsoever. Wether it's pro SV or contra, whatever you read here is just one guy stating something out of hundreds of thousands who all think differently.

If you look at representation statistics it seems that the overwhelming majority of Hunters avoid SV, actually. This isn't just a bunch of forum trolls.

Me, as a hunter only player since late vanilla, thinks SV is currently the most fun to play spec.

I don't really care what you think because 100% of your posts on this subforum are desperate attempts to seem fair and middle-grounded.

I guess I'm out of touch as well, but I still feel like people are being crybabies about this whole thing and I can understand why some people can't relate to you guys.

What's so difficult to understand here? SV was once a popular and celebrated spec and now it's a pariah spec hated by most of its own class. People want to see Blizzard stop wasting their time and dying on this "melee Hunter" hill. It was a stupid idea to start with and it's stupid to this day.

Even if we never see anything like pre-Legion SV again why not just make the current SV fully ranged? It's like two abilities away from it anyway. Would it suddenly not be the most fun Hunter spec to you?

Tbh, I think I'm looking at this way more objectively than most people here, including RSV-pushers.

You're defending melee Survival just for the hell of it knowing that its a major barrier keeping most Hunters away from ever entertaining the spec. That's as far from "objective" as it gets.

Because people would play it if it was good

When ranged Survival had performance levels similar to current Survival (i.e. moderately behind other Hunter specs in some areas but on par/ahead in others) it would still have decent representation. We know this from tiers like Blackrock Foundry and Siege of Orgrimmar.

Sure; if they buff it to have a major numerical advantage over everything else people might play it. But the fact that it needs such an enormous advantage to see any play shows that the problems extend well beyond numerical performance.

It's worth nothing that BM right now is slightly more popular than MM in M+ despite generally being worse. I would probably even rate SV above BM in M+ yet it sees a tiny fraction of the playerbase.

I'm currently getting stuck in and leveling Heritage races to max for their sets, and I see plenty of SV hunters at low level in dungeons. My 2 hunters currently leveling have been SV from the start.

You can take comfort in your anecdotal "data" but people have been saying stuff like this since Legion's launch and it has literally never panned out to any significant representation of SV.

Out of touch because of my opinion about a class? Taking "being offended because of nothing" to a whole new level aren't we?

You know, every time you post major cringe on the Hunter subforum and you get pushback for it you retreat to the "It's my opinion and you can't say anything about it >" shield. Just an observation.

It's fine to just prefer melee to ranged. What's not fine is pretending the ranged Hunter specs are bad and that the people who stick to them are stupid and bad for not giving Survival any attention, and that's exactly what you do every time you show up here.

Vanilla MM sucks on high Itemlevel, trust me I had /played more over one year after two years vanilla. But if you like go ahead explain way should flat 5% range damage and a sticky AP true shot aura be better then at least 3% crit and 15% agi?

No, I will not trust you because you repeatedly demonstrate your lack of understanding of Vanilla Hunter design and the state of the class back then including throughout this post. I also have zero reason to believe that an account less than 2 weeks old belongs to someone who was apparently logged on to the Vanilla WoW servers for an average of 12 hours a day over its entire lifespan.

Marksmanship was the prime raiding spec for Hunters, period. It had the highest DPS value talents and Trueshot Aura was a valuable buff that BM/SV could not match. SV scaled better with Lightning Reflexes but it was unquestionably behind for most of Vanilla and only arguably on par in BiS Naxx gear (assuming your party had a backup Trueshot Aura, of course). In any case that SV spec was played at range so I'm not sure what your end goal is here.

Next SV a ranged build around the exploshot? WTF … had you choose the dark arrow I would my agree … but explo? The first SV fantasy was melee with pet, it was there in the wow beta and on the release day, no explo … this was wotlk.

Yes, the SV Hunter with Explosive Shot and Black Arrow, which started in WotLK, was the most popular iteration of the spec.

No, SV was not a melee spec in Vanilla. It had all the melee-buffing talents but the intent of the spec was not to ditch your ranged weapon and fight in melee. The melee buffs were for situational usage. All Hunters were intended to fight primarily at range. That was baked into the foundation of the class.

You can use a bow/gun also as SV

I didn't read beyond this part of the paragraph because absolutely nothing you can say beyond this could possibly have any value. SV's ability to use a ranged weapon is deliberately handicapped and not even close to being considered a valid playstyle. You can't use your primary damage ability, you can't use Kill Shot for some reason, weapon swapping incurs a GCD, and Auto-Shot has a hidden -50% damage aura for SV. It's entirely tokenistic and doesn't amount to any sort of real capability. Top PvP Hunters have commented on this and they're in agreement that there are literally 0 cases where it's worth swapping to a ranged weapon as Survival.

So MM or BM better in open world then the SV? Jesus I got belly pain from laughing. But OK, try to pull 20 npc as MM,BM and SV kill all and repeat. As MM you will de anyway, maybe you can use nf or cy CD to hardly manage this, same with the BM. As sv it is so easy just pull, root and bomb all dead in 3 sec without use of any CD. It is awesome … Or you can use the harpoon and jump from one mob to another, killing the target mob during the fly to him this as style no other class had this. Speedleveling with BM is just because of the leak of gear … that’s all.

I did in fact explicitly highlight that SV was probably better than MM in the open world, actually. Read better next time.

The point is that BM is the best at the open world hands down. Pulls of 20 NPCs were in fact easy as BM even with the cap on Beast Cleave because your pet would easily tank everything and be healed by its leech + we have the tactical nuke that is Dire Beast: Hawk which is not capped and has a 30 second cooldown. Survival's root, by the way, is a talent which a) has a 45 sec cooldown and b) requires speccing out of Posthaste which further reduces your leveling efficiency. You also aren't killing entire packs in just 3 seconds with Wildfire Bomb in leveling gear. SV Hunters love to talk up their capabilities and damage like this but I've seen how SV Hunters handle the open world and they aren't pulling this sort of thing off.

I knew you would harp on about Harpoon (pun intended) which is why I addressed it before you even mentioned it. Evidently you skipped over that part too. Harpoon is utterly meaningless when comparing advantages between specs in leveling. It's a catchup for the built-in melee handicap that the other Hunters don't have to deal with and it's primarily a concern for single-target anyway. Jumping around killing things one-by-one is not an efficient way to level no matter how much it feels like it to naive melee fanatics who don't know any better. BM can churn through huge pull after huge pull just by gathering them and pet-tanking them to death. The only argument in Harpoon's favour is you can loot the mob easier, which really doesn't mean much when a) you usually don't have to loot mobs anyway and b) Looterang/Fetch exist... not to mention BM can just close the cap while fighting because it's a fully-mobile ranged DPS.

You haven't come across some secret to Hunter speed leveling here. Every Hunter focused on speed leveling to any serious capacity was playing BM for a good reason: it is by far the best Hunter solo spec bar none. No amount of Survival shilling will change that. Like I said Survival Hunters are infamous for upselling their spec to high heaven in a desperate attempt to get more people to play it so it really doesn't carry much weight any more.

What is so hard to understand for you? There are tons of people how like the survival hunter and are able to play. So just stop blaming the sv, this is a powerful fun spec with a very good gameplay, complexity and fantasy behind.

The whole point of threads like these, as the title suggests, is that there aren't tons of people who like the current Survival Hunter. It's consistently one of the least popular specs in the game and is a frequent contender for last place. Right now it's last place, in fact, with wowranks tracking just 20k SV Hunters out of 330k Hunters total. You can keep tricking yourself into believing that it's an amazing spec and everyone loves it but that never actually helps the spec.

We could be happy that the SV is not another range spec, because people how like to play MM are not feeling forced to swap to SV for any reason like 5% more damage for on patch and then spec back again to MM how had for one patch the nose ahead .. Blabla this sucks. Blizzard make this great decision gameplay focused, this is really good.

This is laughable reaching. In fact people like more spec options, not less. Not much else to say about this increasingly deranged "reasoning".

Yes … I like to see more range ability and more big hits from the raptor. They are allways to low ... last time a DK grab me back, ... zack 15k Raptor in the face finished this. Jesus what a fun as SV.

Note to SV Hunters: no one cares about what you can pull off in totally non-competitive casual PVP settings. It's literally meaningless. As MM I can clear out entire AV tower teams in seconds through the wall with Reonating Arrow + all my cooldowns. I don't use that as a platform to pretend MM is an amazing PvP spec.

I wanted to add a image from the first hunter ... but it seems to be not allowed. So feel free to google and you will found plenty stoneage images with hunters using melee weapons like pike and harpoon. hehehe

Ah yes I'm so glad they reverted my exotic munitions expert to be more like a Hunter from the literal stone age. Listen to yourself.

It plays nothing like BM.

It looks like he's talking more about SV's identity. It borrows a LOT from BM thematically including outright stealing Spirit Bond. The popular talking point is that apparently renaming Bestial Wrath to Coordinated Assault means that SV is a "companion" of its beasts rather than a "master". Obviously this is a futile attempt to draw a thematic distinction when there is none but SV Hunters love this line and frequently proclaim that the spec is "more BM than BM". This is why it attracts hostility from people who like BM; the whole point of making it melee in the first place was ostensibly to make it more thematically cohesive and independent yet it's totally directionless and leans heavily on BM's identity.

Showing how other people would be unnecessarily negative over a similar event, doesn't justify being unnecessarily negative over this.

Actually it does justify it because what he's demonstrating is that similar design approaches have similar consequences. You don't remake specs of a class to appeal to people who don't play that class. It's a recipe for disaster and it's what doomed melee Survival. Melee Mage would be bad for all the same reasons.

They are ignoring that just as many people play hunter because they like the pet aspect.

Judging by Survival's dismal popularity since being made melee and what Hunters are actually saying about the subject it really does seem as though most of them do want ranged weapons, in fact. If so many people were in it just for the pets Survival would surely not be so perpetually unpopular.

In fact, my biggest complaint about SV right now is there's so many BM only pets. Spirit beasts should be the only pet SV can't use.

"Why do people compare SV to BM? BTW I love SV for its mastery of beasts and I hope they steal even more things from BM to make it better"

SV brain logic often borders on parody.

[Bodakane]

It looks like he's talking more about SV's identity. It borrows a LOT from BM thematically including outright stealing Spirit Bond. The popular talking point is that apparently renaming Bestial Wrath to Coordinated Assault means that SV is a "companion" of its beasts rather than a "master". Obviously this is a futile attempt to draw a thematic distinction when there is none but SV Hunters love this line and frequently proclaim that the spec is "more BM than BM". This is why it attracts hostility from people who like BM; the whole point of making it melee in the first place was ostensibly to make it more thematically cohesive and independent yet it's totally directionless and leans heavily on BM's identity.

It doesn't other than they are hunters and have pets. Nothing your saying here is actually fact.

Actually it does justify it because what he's demonstrating is that similar design approaches have similar consequences. You don't remake specs of a class to appeal to people who don't play that class. It's a recipe for disaster and it's what doomed melee Survival. Melee Mage would be bad for all the same reasons.

No it doesn't. It just shows many wow gamers like to clutch pearls. I mean i get it, if you like a spec and it gets fundamentally changed, that's sad and frustrating. But virtually all of you are complaining that the new spec sucks simply based on missing the old one. It is possible to miss an old spec and still think the new one is fun. They aren't mutually exclusive....unless you talk to WoW players.....

Judging by Survival's dismal popularity since being made melee and what Hunters are actually saying about the subject it really does seem as though most of them do want ranged weapons, in fact. If so many people were in it just for the pets Survival would surely not be so perpetually unpopular.

The hunters saying anything are the vocal minority. Its akin to the few people who cried that vanilla was going to crush retail.

"Why do people compare SV to BM? BTW I love SV for its mastery of beasts and I hope they steal even more things from BM to make it better"

SV brain logic often borders on parody.

Jesus.

#1. I never asked why people compare BM to SV.
#2. I never said i love SV for its mastery of beasts.
#3. All I said is that SV PLAYS NOTHING LIKE BM.
#4. I said like playing hunter because the pets and want access to more pets when I play SV. I also play BM. I never play MM, btw....no focus on pets.

Before you worry about other people's logic, work on your reading...


..then work on your own logic....because you guys are literally telling me this spec is so different its terrible but it plays just like a spec that isn't terrible that 50% pf the hunters play. Which is it?