They Should Not Remove The Ability For Hunters To Be Melee

[ro9ue]

I don't care if it means getting a fourth spec if Survival goes back to Ranged, please, do not remove Melee Hunter. I like the feel and class fantasy of it, and I'm sure many others do.

I think what would be cool is melee remains an option for Survival, but also becomes an option for Beast Mastery so I can live out the Rexxar fantasy.

[bloodmoth13]

Melee hunter is only unique in that it shows that blizzard is completely willing to ignore basic game design and handicap something instead of iterating on it to improve it. Again, in the context of the WoW hunter class, one of the defining characteristics of the hunter class prior to the legion rework was that all the specs were functionally melee with a 40yd range on their damaging abilities. The only thing that separates sv from the rest of the hunter specs is this handicap.

Then give them something to boost them. Thats probably more an issue with blizzard being too generous to hunters to begin with though tbh. no ranged class should be able to fight as easily in melee as in range.

[Lord Pebbleton]

I can concede that melee hunter can exist, but under no circumstances should it be the best hunter spec.

I have been a ranged hunter for more than 10 years, currently MM. I saw the dps difference between my spec and survival, so I got my enchants, food buff, gems, legendaries and a 272 melee weapon ready to try it out on a m+17.

Holy shit what an absolute chore. What an abomination of a spec. It feels like I am someone cosplaying a hunter without ever having seen a hunter. I look like a warrior going through hard times in life. Suddenly I have 100 more mechanics to follow while dancing around a rotation that feels straight out of Vanilla.

The dps was good, I will not lie, but I would rather do half of that damage just to keep on being ranged and feeling like I am playing the class I have been playing for a decade. Whoever thought melee hunter needed to be the current best spec for us should get a 24 hour cooldown on his hearthstone.

[Eapoe]

So we're just ignoring the part of the quote where i told you all pure dps specs(and the warrior dps specs as well) had functionally the same damage priority list within the same class. Hunters were the victim of blizzard being lazy, if the spells hunters had in common had different names between the specs the hunter priority lists would look identical to the mage or warlock ones.

How am I ignoring anything? Did you even read my first reply to you after you brought this up and pointed out that the argument you made supports my point even further? You stating multiple classes, not just Hunter, played the same way isn’t some kind of gotcha moment you think it is. It’s not even a counter argument. It just supports my point when I stated Hunters specs played the same and were interchangeable.
In the case of Hunters, this lasted multiple xpacs and many years, until Legion when SV became a melee spec and BM and MM play styles changed away from each other.

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I can concede that melee hunter can exist, but under no circumstances should it be the best hunter spec.

I have been a ranged hunter for more than 10 years, currently MM. I saw the dps difference between my spec and survival, so I got my enchants, food buff, gems, legendaries and a 272 melee weapon ready to try it out on a m+17.

Holy shit what an absolute chore. What an abomination of a spec. It feels like I am someone cosplaying a hunter without ever having seen a hunter. I look like a warrior going through hard times in life. Suddenly I have 100 more mechanics to follow while dancing around a rotation that feels straight out of Vanilla.

The dps was good, I will not lie, but I would rather do half of that damage just to keep on being ranged and feeling like I am playing the class I have been playing for a decade. Whoever thought melee hunter needed to be the current best spec for us should get a 24 hour cooldown on his hearthstone.

So go ahead and play BM or MM in keys and do what you want. You say you would rather do 1/2 damage just to keep being ranged. So do that.
It’s also only the best spec for m+ and a few boss fights in raid. And you don’t even need to play it in m+ to be viable or clear a 20.

[saixilein]

Wont happen until they do a big Class overhaul, like they did in Legion. But even then i dont think they delete SV Hunters.

[KrayZ33]

I can concede that melee hunter can exist, but under no circumstances should it be the best hunter spec.

I have been a ranged hunter for more than 10 years, currently MM. I saw the dps difference between my spec and survival, so I got my enchants, food buff, gems, legendaries and a 272 melee weapon ready to try it out on a m+17.

Holy shit what an absolute chore. What an abomination of a spec. It feels like I am someone cosplaying a hunter without ever having seen a hunter. I look like a warrior going through hard times in life. Suddenly I have 100 more mechanics to follow while dancing around a rotation that feels straight out of Vanilla.

The dps was good, I will not lie, but I would rather do half of that damage just to keep on being ranged and feeling like I am playing the class I have been playing for a decade. Whoever thought melee hunter needed to be the current best spec for us should get a 24 hour cooldown on his hearthstone.

Oh come on... you are playing MM but compare the SV rotation with Vanilla gameplay
That's really uncalled for.

As someone who played Hunter since Vanilla and mained it (quite literally 99,9% of my gameplay is spent playing it) since BC I'm glad SV is as good as it is right now.
The other 2 specs feel like they are 15 years old. I'm still annoyed about what MM ended up as - from BFA onwards.
The "grenade spam" is at least only temporary and thanks to wildfire, still way more fun than what MM or BM does while AoE-ing

It's not that I didn't like how SV played during WoD before they killed it, but right now, it's still way above the rest.

[exsanguinate]

It was more I have seen people saying Survival should go back to how it was before Legion (as a Ranged spec)

and thats why you panic?

[Lord Pebbleton]

So go ahead and play BM or MM in keys and do what you want. You say you would rather do 1/2 damage just to keep being ranged. So do that. It’s also only the best spec for m+ and a few boss fights in raid. And you don’t even need to play it in m+ to be viable or clear a 20.

This is exactly what I am gonna do

Oh come on... you are playing MM but compare the SV rotation with Vanilla gameplay
That's really uncalled for.

As someone who played Hunter since Vanilla and mained it (quite literally 99,9% of my gameplay is spent playing it) since BC I'm glad SV is as good as it is right now.
The other 2 specs feel like they are 15 years old. I'm still annoyed about what MM ended up as - from BFA onwards.
The "grenade spam" is at least only temporary and thanks to wildfire, still way more fun than what MM or BM does while AoE-ing

It's not that I didn't like how SV played during WoD before they killed it, but right now, it's still way above the rest.

I was referring to the meme melee hunter spec that you could occasionally find up to WotLK.

[cparle87]

Because we're in the tail end of an expansion and an entire class overhaul is on the horizon. Blizzard follows Semantic Versioning with its patches. Hence why Patch 6.1 back in WoD was correctly labelled as Patch 6.1 and not Patch 6.0.x even though there was no new raid as had been the standard up until then.

Not sure where you got the idea that main patches having a raid was "the standard until 6.1" like that was the patch that broke it.

For instance only 4 of vanilla's 12 main patches added a new raid. A lot of them were other kinds of content updates like adding weather or giving unique looks to the original tier sets or... you know, actually finishing the game that was half done at launch.

TBC had the voice chat patch. Weird, I don't remember it getting the same level of hate as the selfie patch.

Cata had the troll dungeon patch. MoP had the Krasarang War and Battlefield Barrens patches.

Since then Blizzard has been craftier and hidden things that would've used to be X.1 or such patches under the X.0.5 names because they realized people freaked out with 6.1. If they'd kept the vanilla numbering model SL would be on like patch 9.6.

Long and short of it is main patches can have new raids and most of them do, but not having them isn't a bad thing.

[KrayZ33]

I was referring to the meme melee hunter spec that you could occasionally find up to WotLK.

Oh, you mean that trap-thingy for LnL-procs? That was "funny". I don't think current SV has that much of clunk though.

[FossilFree]

Survival should become a tank spec. It's already melee, so no pet tanking positioning issues. Plus it's called survival, which pretty much implies it should be a tank already. Why would a dps need to survive? That's tank territory.

[Eosia]

Not sure where you got the idea that main patches having a raid was "the standard until 6.1" like that was the patch that broke it.

Because out of the 31 patches (2.0 - 9.2), 25 of them had raids. That's 81% of the time so it set the expectation. Some of those patches you listed added other content. 5.3, Escalation, added four new Scenarios, a heroic difficulty level for scenarios, a new Battleground, and a new Arena as well as the Battlefield Barrens content.

Go read the site I linked to.

[FluffyHuggyBear]

I have been playing Hunter since WotLK up to Legion and then again in Shadowlands. To be honest, the rework in Legion destroyed it for me. I am not interested in playing a melee specc. I enjoyed MM at the end of WoD and also BM in the middle of WoD. But I mostly enjoyed rSV. For me personally, there has always been enough distinction in the playstyle, so speccs felt different. This was most pronounced in the middle/end of WoD, where all speccs felt really different:

BM - all about Bestial Wrath management (and everything that was connected to that CD) - relly fun in blackrock foundry
MM - hardhitting (burst) casterplaystyle and you need to get your movement right to optimize damage (I relly enjoyed it in Hellfire Citadel with 4pc)
SV - the dot'n'procc specc - LnL was what made it so fun for me - and that felt relly different to the other two speccs

I think WoD was a good basis to iterate on all three speccs and there would have been a good chance to create even more distinct speccs going in to Legion based on the WoD state.

Looking at the state of BM and MM now, I see how the core of MM has evolved really nicely, but it got mixed up with some SV stuff which really makes it unenjoyable for me. LnL was such a major focus for SV and not it is just a rare procc that is not payed much attention to. ES being just an AOE tool, that is just fire and forget makes me sad.

I think that if they would have iterated on SV and continued to create more distinction to the speccs, we could have 3 really nice ranged speccs which play very differently. I dont want to take away mSV from anyone, but if rSV would come back as a well designed 4th specc based on the nice magical damage/dots/proccs playstyle (you can call it whatever you want, does not need to be named SV) I would be really happy to play my hunter again. Right now I am planning to play WotLKC to experience at least some rSV feeling again (still missing the focus mechanics here, but what can you do).

I do not understand why people are so anti-rSV when it could simply be a 4th specc. People could still enjouy mSV if they want to. MM could get rid of all the rSV waste it has in his kit and create an even better sniper identity.

It's really sad that there is no discussion about how can we please the majority of the people. rSV was a popular specc back then and many people enjoyed it. I dont get why it has less of a right to exist then mSV. I mean isnt the most important thing that people enjoy the playstyle rather than how different the speccs feel?

I mean in the end it comes down to "you press a button" --> "something happens". So basically every class is the same with different animations, numbers and names. And still everybody enjoys different classes/speccs.

[keyone01]

I do not understand why people are so anti-rSV when it could simply be a 4th specc.

Because they consciously (or not) know that the very moment this happens they will become feral of hunter specs, instead they prefer to think that msv is actually fine and not a joke artificially pumped up by borrowed power/tuning/unique utility (pvp).

[Eapoe]

Because they consciously (or not) know that the very moment this happens they will become feral of hunter specs, instead they prefer to think that msv is actually fine and not a joke artificially pumped up by borrowed power/tuning/unique utility (pvp).

Isn’t every spec artificially pumped up by borrowed power?
Also, how is tuning/unique utility artificially pumped up?

[Worgar]

How am I ignoring anything? Did you even read my first reply to you after you brought this up and pointed out that the argument you made supports my point even further? You stating multiple classes, not just Hunter, played the same way isn’t some kind of gotcha moment you think it is. It’s not even a counter argument. It just supports my point when I stated Hunters specs played the same and were interchangeable.
In the case of Hunters, this lasted multiple xpacs and many years, until Legion when SV became a melee spec and BM and MM play styles changed away from each other.

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So go ahead and play BM or MM in keys and do what you want. You say you would rather do 1/2 damage just to keep being ranged. So do that.
It’s also only the best spec for m+ and a few boss fights in raid. And you don’t even need to play it in m+ to be viable or clear a 20.

So every pure dps spec in the game (and the warrior dps specs) had similar damage priority lists amongst specs in the same class, this wasn't unique to hunters. Blizzard redesigned all the specs going into legion sv could've stayed the exact same and it would've no longer played like the other hunter specs. Are you going to address how in the hunter class game design space, melee is literally nothing but a handicap. Or how blizzard only changed the role of sv to melee and not any of the specs from pure dps classes. It's almost like the decision to make sv melee was arbitrary and wasn't made for the thematic reasons they said.

[Eapoe]

So every pure dps spec in the game (and the warrior dps specs) had similar damage priority lists amongst specs in the same class, this wasn't unique to hunters. Blizzard redesigned all the specs going into legion sv could've stayed the exact same and it would've no longer played like the other hunter specs. Are you going to address how in the hunter class game design space, melee is literally nothing but a handicap. Or how blizzard only changed the role of sv to melee and not any of the specs from pure dps classes. It's almost like the decision to make sv melee was arbitrary and wasn't made for the thematic reasons they said.

How is melee a handicap? People, who play it well, have played it in high end content.
It’s also been shown that with good tuning and tier sets that it can be a really fun spec with good damage behind it.
You also keep typing “ So every pure dps spec in the game (and the warrior dps specs) had similar damage priority lists amongst specs in the same class, this wasn't unique to hunters,” and act like this doesn’t support what I stated previously. No matter how many replies you put this statement in, it does nothing but lend support to my statement that every Hunter spec played identical.
Blizzard also changed the design of plenty of specs. Arms and Fury don’t really play too similarly at this time. Nor do Arcane, Frost, or Fire for Mage. Sub, Assassination, and Outlaw have pretty decent diversity between specs. No Warlock spec plays the exact same that I’m aware of.
SV seems pretty thematic to me. Character plays side by side with their pet using traps and munitions to bring down their prey. Seems like that’s a pretty decent design philosophy.
Maybe Blizzard was creatively bankrupt when trying to figure out how to make it a 3rd rdps spec that played with a bow.
I’ve constantly stated Blizzard should have just made a 4th spec instead of deleting range SV; but they didn’t and we have what we have. What we have is an incredibly fun spec that Blizzard has trouble balancing, and has a stigma of being melee, where a player could be rdps, when guilds are already too melee heavy that brings nothing unique to the game.

[Worgar]

How is melee a handicap? People, who play it well, have played it in high end content.
It’s also been shown that with good tuning and tier sets that it can be a really fun spec with good damage behind it.
You also keep typing “ So every pure dps spec in the game (and the warrior dps specs) had similar damage priority lists amongst specs in the same class, this wasn't unique to hunters,” and act like this doesn’t support what I stated previously. No matter how many replies you put this statement in, it does nothing but lend support to my statement that every Hunter spec played identical.
Blizzard also changed the design of plenty of specs. Arms and Fury don’t really play too similarly at this time. Nor do Arcane, Frost, or Fire for Mage. Sub, Assassination, and Outlaw have pretty decent diversity between specs. No Warlock spec plays the exact same that I’m aware of.
SV seems pretty thematic to me. Character plays side by side with their pet using traps and munitions to bring down their prey. Seems like that’s a pretty decent design philosophy.
Maybe Blizzard was creatively bankrupt when trying to figure out how to make it a 3rd rdps spec that played with a bow.
I’ve constantly stated Blizzard should have just made a 4th spec instead of deleting range SV; but they didn’t and we have what we have. What we have is an incredibly fun spec that Blizzard has trouble balancing, and has a stigma of being melee, where a player could be rdps, when guilds are already too melee heavy that brings nothing unique to the game.

My apologies, I made the assumption that you were against rsv coming back.

Hunters niche as a class, prior to the legion reworks, was that it was functionally a ranged melee. It had auto attacks and shots instead of cast times like the other ranged dps in the game(mm is the outlier here with aimed shot casts, i don't remember if it was cata or mop that made it a cast.). Before the legion reworks all three hunter specs had full damage potential anywhere within 40yds of the target. After the rework sv is now stuck in melee range to do full damage to a target.

[FluffyHuggyBear]

How is melee a handicap? People, who play it well, have played it in high end content.
It’s also been shown that with good tuning and tier sets that it can be a really fun spec with good damage behind it.
You also keep typing “ So every pure dps spec in the game (and the warrior dps specs) had similar damage priority lists amongst specs in the same class, this wasn't unique to hunters,” and act like this doesn’t support what I stated previously. No matter how many replies you put this statement in, it does nothing but lend support to my statement that every Hunter spec played identical.
Blizzard also changed the design of plenty of specs. Arms and Fury don’t really play too similarly at this time. Nor do Arcane, Frost, or Fire for Mage. Sub, Assassination, and Outlaw have pretty decent diversity between specs. No Warlock spec plays the exact same that I’m aware of.
SV seems pretty thematic to me. Character plays side by side with their pet using traps and munitions to bring down their prey. Seems like that’s a pretty decent design philosophy.
Maybe Blizzard was creatively bankrupt when trying to figure out how to make it a 3rd rdps spec that played with a bow.
I’ve constantly stated Blizzard should have just made a 4th spec instead of deleting range SV; but they didn’t and we have what we have. What we have is an incredibly fun spec that Blizzard has trouble balancing, and has a stigma of being melee, where a player could be rdps, when guilds are already too melee heavy that brings nothing unique to the game.

I agree that hunters played similar up until the beginning of Cata. But even during WotLK, SV was the outlier with it's procc based rotation, which made it more dynamic compared to MM or BM.

Already during Cata, SV and MM felt vastly different in their playstyles with MM playing around RF windows and reacting to haste proccs with hardcasted aimed shots and SV having the dot'n'procc playstyle. With the ability bloat in MOP they again shared a lot of things because these were not specc specific but in WoD they played very differently at least for me.

But yeah, SV always was a unfitting name for the dot'n'procc playstyle and fits the current theme better - I agree with that.

[thunderdragon2]

I don't think they will, but I honestly wished BM was the melee spec

That way Marksman could have been the physical damage spec and Survival be the magic damage spec

i prefer bm as ranged personally only reasons i play bm is coz its ranged i dont have to deal wiht a cast bar and i enjoy it as a ranged as the rest of my toons are melee i dont enjoy mm and surv is melee

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I agree. Guys like Rexxar fit the aesthetic of a BM hunter well, going into melee combat side by side with your powerful anima companion.

ok no ur as a survival hunter a survivalist like a gather hunter type there's no way some1 like that could tame and train specialised beasts as pets so survival would have fit more than bm