Who is going to main Survival in BFA?

[Deleted]

*narrator voice*

And it did not take long for the wailing creatures of misery to emerge from their shadowy dwellings. They struck with haste, their appetite for debating the design principles of the survival specialisation being insatiable.

[Lord Pebbleton]

I played survival just to complete the mage tower challenge lel.
The spec is stupid. No one ever asked for that. I've met warlocks saying "boy, I wish they gave us a tanking spec"; I've met mages saying "boy, I wish they gave us a healing spec". I've never heard anyone say "boy, I wish that one of the three hunter specs became 100% melee".

[kraid]

At some point I probably play one as an alt but the bad news for survival is that the new stand animation for ranged weapons is just too cool to not play it.

[Deleted]

I agree, I don't get why Survival wouldn't be a melee spec like any others. It's just like Druid - Boomkin's the ranged option and obviously gets preferred, but Feral players still do exist. Most of the arguments against it don't really make sense to me.

[Bepples]

I think that the main issue Survival has (beyond being poorly designed in Legion) is that most Hunter players (and really, players overall) are generally crying babies, incapable of accepting anything outside of their comfort zone. While such narrow thinking is normal, it isn't great to base game design around it.

Yeah. Sure. The issue is not Blizzard's shit class design but it's the thousands of Hunter mains who have the sheer temerity of not wanting to play a melee spec. It's almost like they think they picked a purely ranged class and had a ranged playstyle they liked and mained for years and years.

What crybabies.

If we wanted to play melee, we would have gone to a fucking melee class. We did not need nor want melee coming to us. Anyone who thinks that Hunters are obligated to entertain the experimental products of Blizzard's melee favouritism is welcome to jump in a lake.

Since you're using arguments such as the class icon from Vanilla (when Survival was partially a melee spec), I'll do the same - do you also whine about Rogues/Warriors being able to use other weapons than Daggers and Swords? Considering we're talking about what weapon we're using. Or maybe you'd whine about Resto Druids not using shapeshifting? If your argument is theme and playstyle.

What does this even mean?

A melee weapon is a melee weapon and a ranged weapon is a ranged weapon. While I've never played a Rogue, I would sympathise with Rogues if Blizzard randomly decided one day to change one of their specs to a 2-handed spec or even a ranged spec. That's not what their class is about and it's not what they signed up for. Same goes for Hunters with ranged weapons. As for Resto Druids: I have no idea how they work, but from my memory they did have a treant form that was once permanent and is now a cooldown... and people do complain about that, so go ask them.

Ranged weapons were core to the identity and playstyle of Hunters. There has been melee for Hunters in the past. It's true. But it's historically been a weaker, bareboned toolkit intended only for a filler when you were stuck in melee and your ranged toolkit had a minimum range. No Hunter spec went without a ranged weapon before Legion. Ranged weapons are so central to Hunters that after just one expansion of having a fully melee spec Blizzard had to tack on a bunch of ranged abilities to it including the nonsense "sidearm crossbow" while directly stating that they needed to actually establish a tie between Survival and the rest of its class via the ranged weapon.

Sidenote: Survival's spec has to my memory always been an axe - the old Mongoose Bite icon, or Camouflage. Comments on that?

A relic of older, shittier class design where there was very little distinction between specs so Blizzard classified the abilities, which were 95% baseline, into specs. Before Survival got any unique abilities worth a damn (i.e. pre-WotLK), it was the "Everything Else" category of Hunters: it included the traps, tracking, and melee. Turns out that's a really bad foundation for a spec so in the 2nd half of Vanilla and BC they started laying the groundwork for a utilitarian ranged spec with Wyvern Sting and Expose Weakness then in WotLK you got the big ones: Explosive Shot, Black Arrow, and Lock and Load.

When they actually got around to defining each spec with a distinct playstyle rather than "which talent tree you spent the most points on" (i.e. Cataclysm), Survival's icon was the icon you see now, which was later reused for Camouflage. I don't know exactly why this icon was chosen because it's very ambiguous, but I assume it's meant to communicate the utilitarian aspect of Survival. This is a far better fit for any pre-Legion iteration of Survival because the melee aspects including Mongoose Bite were not core to the spec's playstyle and identity. Yes, even before the 1.7 update.

That said, the natural change I'm talking about refers more to the classic fantasy of a ranger than specifically the WoW Hunter class as it's evolved through the years. Keep in mind that Survival in Hunters' original design was meant to work for both ranged and melee.

Why the fuck are we forcing the WoW Hunter to be something different 12 years later? WoW Hunters do not suddenly need to conform to some random other fantasy archetype. They were already defined and iterated upon in this game. And they were established as the ranged weapon class. Maybe people would be more open to a melee Hunter if there were other ranged weapon options in the game but there aren't: Hunters have all the ranged weapons so people expected the Hunter class to flesh out that fantasy aspect and let the wealth of other melee classes manage those themes. With the removal of ranged Survival there is now a big part of ranged weapon user archetypes, i.e. augmenting projectiles, which is all but absent from the game.

And let me emphasise: no matter the circumstances, drastically shifting the direction of a spec over a decade into the game's lifespan is futile and moronic. There is no valid case for it. The time for defining the identities of each spec has long passed.

Survival Hunter's original design was the Hunter that was slightly less worse off in melee range. Like every other starry-eyed, clueless melee lover, you're projecting the modern impact of spec choice into the past. In original WoW the overwhelming majority of your class identity and playstyle, expressed via its toolkit, was available in the base class. You did not open a specialisation menu and click "Survival" and click select. You spent a certain amount of talent points, most of which were strictly passive bonuses, and carried on doing what your class did. This is especially true for the pure DPS specs. All three Hunter specs had a melee aspect shoehorned onto them. Survival's talents buffed those melee abilities. It still used a ranged weapon and classic Hunter abilities such as Arcane Shot, Multi-Shot, and Serpent Sting; abilities it had all the way up until Legion took them away, so spare me the waxing on about how Survival is more true to it's roots now. And, most importantly, you never deliberately ran into melee.

Even if Survival was meant to be a mix of melee and ranged and ignoring the fact that we had several expansions in-between where it was thoroughly ranged and had a far more established and enjoyable identity than what came before or after: why is it entirely melee right now? BFA makes an effort to make it semi-ranged, but it still doesn't have a ranged weapon or any of those ranged weapons it had from Vanilla barring Serpent Sting. And no, I don't consider an inexplicable micro-crossbow animation on one ability to be equivalent to actually having and using a ranged weapon.

Yes, the change was poorly done, and Marksman didn't become Marksman + old Survival as Blizzard said it would, but that doesn't mean it isn't a natural change.

Why should we be cramming two largely-incompatible specs into one just to make space for yet another generic melee that hardly anyone wants? We make things worse-off for both Marksman players and former ranged Survival players just so the handful of people who would actually entertain the melee Hunter niche can enjoy an entire spec spot just to themselves? Fuck that noise. You have 12 other specs to go to if you want to play melee so badly. Go get lost in one of those.

Lastly, the point isn't that 3 distinct ranged weapon specs isn't possible (obviously, it is) - but rather that it didn't feel as natural as melee Survival did. I agree that there are too many melee specs (let's not be retarded though, and compare them as they actually are - 13 melee specs on 9 classes and 11 ranged specs on 6 classes).

Bwahahahahaha, completely reworking a spec from the ground-up to be something totally different from the rest of its class and its prior iterations, thus alienating its entire former audience and forcing a second remake within 2 years just to bring it back in line, is more "natural" than continuing the expansion-by-expansion process of iteration that made Survival what it was before Legion came around? Sometimes I like to just take the ridiculous statements the Survival apologists come up with and just lay it down in front of everyone so we can just admire the absurdity of the thought process. This is one of those times.

And yeah: there are too many melee specs. So melee Hunters can shove it. The reason I put Hunters in a different category to other ranged is because they are the only ones that use ranged weapons. It is a very unique and distinct mode of combat that no one else uses. And the retconning of a purely melee spec onto the class diminishes the already-small pool of those unique specs. You may think it makes the class less homogeneous and that's perfectly correct... but it makes the whole game more homogeneous. So it's very simple: too many melee weapon specs, not enough ranged weapon specs.... stop forcing the melee weapons into the ranged weapon class. Even if you think it makes perfect sense to do so, the game simply doesn't need more melee.

[LoLcano]

You'll have about 20 LFR people play it and questers, thats about it.

This . Serious raiders always pick another spec .

[Bepples]

I agree, I don't get why Survival wouldn't be a melee spec like any others. It's just like Druid - Boomkin's the ranged option and obviously gets preferred, but Feral players still do exist. Most of the arguments against it don't really make sense to me.

They don't make sense to you because you are being deliberately ignorant.

Here's the rundown:

Feral has always been a purely melee spec and the spec as a whole, while very different to its original playstyle, can still be traced back to its original version if you just go back through each iteration all the way back to the start. The audience today is largely a similar set of people, or even some of the same people, to what it was 5 years ago.

Survival has not always been a purely melee spec; in fact, it was, until not too long ago, a purely ranged spec. You can't just walk back through each iteration to find a logical path beginning from the start because Legion suddenly and jarringly changed it to something entirely different. The audience today is largely a separate group of people to those who enjoyed the spec 5 years ago.

Your tactic here is "ignore historical context". That isn't going to work. Historical context is EVERYTHING when it comes to Survival.

[Sastank]

Continue the onslaught. Give them no quarter.

[Ashmiel]

As someone who thinks Legion SV is the most fun and amazing spec since ..well, since forever, I still haven't made up my mind if I will main it for BfA. Need to test more I suppose.

[Locruid]

It's nothing about skill. No one rolled hunter to play melee. No one asked for melee spec. That's the problem. No one wants one more melee in theirs raid is another reason. Melee SV was DOA and will continue to be until Blizz revert it to ranged.

Proof? Cause I seen a LOT of Survival hunters in Legion. And dont post Warcaft logs cause they only follow endgame raiding stuff which is NOT representative of the majority of the players.

From my perspective and opinion, I seen far less Brewmasters than Survival.

Just cause you're bitter over something doesnt mean everyone else shared your OPINIONS

[TOM_RUS]

Proof? Cause I seen a LOT of Survival hunters in Legion. And dont post Warcaft logs cause they only follow endgame raiding stuff which is NOT representative of the majority of the players.

From my perspective and opinion, I seen far less Brewmasters than Survival.

Just cause you're bitter over something doesnt mean everyone else shared your OPINIONS

You won't see "a LOT of Survival hunters" in Normal and above raiding, which is where actual game is. I've seen ZERO of them through whole Legion life span. No one with a little brain would choose melee SV over other available classes with melee specs.

[Ashmiel]

You won't see "a LOT of Survival hunters" in Normal and above raiding, which is where actual game is. I've seen ZERO of them through whole Legion life span. No one with a little brain would choose melee SV over other available classes with melee specs.

Well, I raid heroic as SV. Can't see how that got anything to do with brains. At that level, play whatever you enjoy, specs doesn't really matter. I'd say it's more those that play whatever is best rather than what they actually enjoy is the ones lacking brain.

[TOM_RUS]

Well, I raid heroic as SV. Can't see how that got anything to do with brains. At that level, play whatever you enjoy, specs doesn't really matter. I'd say it's more those that play whatever is best rather than what they actually enjoy is the ones lacking brain.

So you enjoy hindering your raid group, got it.

[barrsftw]

Change isn't automatically bad, but it isn't automatically good either. Survival was a bad change.

You're out of your mind if you think it was a great change. It alienated the class so badly that it stayed at rock-bottom popularity for the entire expansion with as much as 98% of raiding Hunters playing the other two specs. How you think a purely ranged class suddenly having a spec become melee overnight is "natural" is beyond me; I guess it's easy when you don't main the class and don't give much of a shit about the people playing it. But actually thinking that one of the most played and beloved ranged specs being suddenly deleted and replaced with the game's most shunned melee specs over a decade into the game's lifespan is peak delusion.



Yes, you heard it first.

Melee is a great match the class with this icon:



Yep. Perfect fit.

Melee just fits right in the class with this original WoW manual description:



Or this design goal:



Flawless.

For real though, you people make this too easy for me.

Oh, and nice "DAE homogenisation XD" meme. Because clearly it's IMPOSSIBLE to make 3 distinct ranged weapon specs. 13 melee weapon specs is fine though!

The original WoW manual description lmao.. come on man.. grasping for straws here.

Being that the most iconic hunter in the WoW universe is a Melee "survival like" hunter I think it makes a ton of sense for the class. You may not enjoy the spec, which is fine, but it definitely fits the class. It definitely seems like the survival spec is not very well received by hunter mains, most of which probably rolled the class to be a ranged specialist. However, I think the spec is much better received by the players who haven't played much hunter that might want to try it out now.

[Ellixen]

It's nothing about skill. No one rolled hunter to play melee. No one asked for melee spec. That's the problem. No one wants one more melee in theirs raid is another reason. Melee SV was DOA and will continue to be until Blizz revert it to ranged.

I asked for a melee spec, It's what survival was supposed to be from vanilla. I love the spec and glad they're keeping it like this.

[Donald Hellscream]

Its among the contenders for BFA main for me, still undecided though.

I don't have strong sentimental feelings about it being a melee spec so I judge it based on the cool factor, and lobbing grenades at enemies while harpooning back and forth makes me happy so if I were to main a hunter in BFA it would be survival.

[Ashmiel]

So you enjoy hindering your raid group, got it.

Clearly you have no clue about Survival so I don't think there is much point "discussing" further.

[TOM_RUS]

Clearly you have no clue about Survival so I don't think there is much point "discussing" further.

Ofc I know what melee Survival is. It's pure bullshit. Obviously there's no point in discussing it.

[Lucavian]

It's nothing about skill. No one rolled hunter to play melee. No one asked for melee spec. That's the problem. No one wants one more melee in theirs raid is another reason. Melee SV was DOA and will continue to be until Blizz revert it to ranged.

Why do all these anti-survival hunters act like nobody has rolled hunter in the last 3ish years? Sorry, but it isn't like there are no new hunter babies being born. Some people did in fact roll hunter to play the melee spec. With that said, the style of survival on BFA is a bit rubbish. Four abilities, and the slowish gameplay, makes the spec pretty dull.

[threads]

i stopped playing hunter completely after legion. class has too many retards giving blizz dumb ideas like "melee specs" and the 2 ranged specs are more boring and plain than ever.