It had a different fantasy/theme to MM. MM focuses on methodical long-range sniping and primarily physical damage attacks. It's more about mastery of the ranged weapon itself. In contrast SV was always more about resourcefulness and utilitarianism and so it had spells based around special munitions like Explosive Shot. It was nice to have these alternate styles of using a ranged weapon. It doesn't feel great to have to pile every single possible ranged weapon mechanic onto essentially one spec. We don't see people going around saying they should combine Arms and Fury into one spec because there's an understanding that they aren't the same thing and provide different styles of melee combat.
There's also the simple fact that SV had a fun and unique gameplay style that no longer exists. You can't really replicate that in MM because MM already has its own style.
P.S. Do you love melee Survival specifically because it's melee or because of how it flows in combat? Because I find with a lot of people who like melee Survival it's the latter and specifically being melee is not the important part.
Most Hunters weren't interested in a melee option so they aren't finding it "nice to switch it up"; they just avoid Survival entirely. Not a good situation.
I can understand wanting to switch between melee and ranged often but that didn't align with the general wishes and desires of the Hunter playerbase and it was pretty unfair to force it on the class at the cost of an existing ranged option.
And yes, I can confidently say most Hunters didn't want melee because Blizzard themselves have said it.
For people like me this sort of statement just makes me hate it even more. It just signals to me that Survival is specifically designed for people who
don't like Hunters and therefore it can't possibly be designed in a way that benefits Hunters.
I don't like Rogues very much. Is it fair for me to demand that one of the specs get changed into a ranged weapon user just because that's what I like more? No, because there are people who play and main Rogues and they probably don't want that. Apparently it's fine to do it to Hunters though.
Not always. MM was pretty close to BM back in 8.1 in terms of represenation and in the past it has surpassed BM despite the movement restrictions. If it's good enough people will play it. Blizzard just struggles to make it good enough to justify the movement restriction.
If you took MM now and made Aimed Shot a mobile class it would
still be less played than BM due to the inherent design flaws of the spec and the dominance of BM right now due to secondary stat abundance combined with BM's crazy scaling. In the past it was always MM that scaled better but that's not the case.
"I'm thankful Hunters get screwed" - you right now
I don't give a fuck about balance, to be honest. It's about having good options for ranged weapon combat. There were only 3 specs in the entire game that used ranged weapons; why remove one? For people who liked ranged weapons it was nice to have that variety in choice, especially since one of them (BM) didn't really specialise much in the ranged weapon to begin with. It's not fair at all to pile all the archetypal ranged weapon abilities onto one spec just to cram in yet another melee spec in this game overflowing with melee specs.
Plus, it's not like it's impossible to balance. There have been plenty of times in the past where you could do just fine in a pure DPS class as any of the three specs. For example, in Blackrock Foundry BM was the best spec but MM and SV were close enough that you could get away with playing those if you wanted to.
It takes a lot of denial to say melee Survival is one of the better changes they made. They spent a hell of a lot of developer time and effort to remake a formerly very popular spec into something hardly anyone plays and causes so much controversy in the Hunter playerbase for years and years to come. Their stated goals were differentiating it from other Hunter specs and giving it a coherent identity and they utterly failed at both as it now uses a bunch of BM abilities and is a weird mix of melee fighter plus pet plus some special ranged stuff including a grenade of all things. How does someone look at this and think "job well done"?
lol
You're right that he is gatekeeping. And he is fully in the right to do it.
Probably the initial outline of the class from Vanilla and every subsequent written brief and in-game design that centred the entire class around ranged weapon?
https://i.imgur.com/kBVr5Uc.png
Going to the dictionary definition of hunter is a pathetic argument. The in-game class was defined around ranged weapons, period. Survival especially is meant to focus on resourcefulness and opportunism. Nothing is more antithetical to that than arbitrarily deciding not to use a ranged weapon.
He really isn't. He was absent from the game for most of its lifespan, being a minor character in Classic and BC then being absent entirely for every expansion afterwards until WoD where he was a minor character again. He has only been "prominent" in the past couple of expansions specifically in an effort to normalise melee Survival.
This is like saying the most prominent priest is Tyrande and she uses a ranged weapon so they should immediately remake Discipline to be a ranged weapon spec. Ultimately the classes are only very loosely based on specific Warcraft characters and are more a combination of specific characters plus common units plus cool new ideas that made sense in WoW. Rexxar was already primarily represented in the class via pets, anyway; you know, since he is a
Beastmaster and the pet side of Rexxar is actually the important part of his identity, not the melee.
Melee Hunter proponents say there wasn't even enough possible variation for more than one
spec that focused on ranged weapons so it's hard to ever consider this to be a sincere statement.
You're doing absolutely no favours by continually portraying ranged weapons as mundane/boring/monotonous. People played Hunters because they liked the ranged part. You're not going to have many melee-loving people coming to a class that is entirely ranged. It doesn't make sense to force a melee option in that case. Most Hunters are just going to avoid it (exactly what we are seeing in Legion and BFA) so you're not so much giving us a new option but taking a popular existing one away.
So cut the spin doctoring because it isn't working.
The real silliness comes from starting at level 1 with a ranged weapon and ranged abilities, and then ditching them at level 10 and having to get a melee weapon if you pick Survival. Shadowlands tries to improve on this by letting you keep Arcane Shot and Steady Shot even as Survival, but it's kind of pointless because you still have to switch to a polearm at level 10 despite most of your abilities being ranged all the way to max level.
Some people do actually argue that. But the fact is, while pets and ranged weapons are important parts of a Hunter, they aren't equally important. Ranged weapons were always far more central and definitive of both our playstyle and identity. Lone Wolf is proof of this. When they added a petless option to MM and SV in WoD all it took was a passive talent option. The way each spec played and felt essentially went unchanged. Making SV into a melee spec, on the other hand, took an enormous amount of time and effort remaking the spec from the ground up. Clearly the ranged weapon matters more.
This is an ignorant and revisionist viewpoint similar to arguing that there is no difference between Affliction and Destruction, or Arms and Fury. They were substantially different.
If you agreed with those examples I gave at least you can say you aren't a hypocrite with double standards. You do, however, have a standard for spec differentiation that is far, far too high. They are not meant to ever be as distinct from one another as different classes. They are meant to share some core aspects.
Cool story, and you would be wrong about that.
Look at what it took to make a petless Hunter: adding the Lone Wolf passive talent options. That was it. Both MM and SV played exactly the same before and after picking it.
Now, look at what it took to make a Hunter without a ranged weapon: completely throwing out everything an existing spec had and remaking it from the ground up.
Gee, I WONDER which one is more definitive??
Nice try at deflection but it's still stupid. The ranged weapon is/was the most central part of the Hunter identity so it's Survival that's the most contrary to the original Hunter. Even if you were right about the pets being more important MM still has the option to use pets. SV does not, however, have the option to use a ranged weapon.
Ranged Survival played nicely.
"Playing nicely" is not dependent on being melee. It doesn't fix all the major problems a melee Hunter spec brings to the class.
zzz more lazy deflection
The difference is MM can and has been a popular spec even if it isn't popular right now. Melee SV has
never been popular even when its damage has been really good in the past. Look to Uldir. It was the only time melee SV had more representation than another Hunter spec (MM). It took Survival being one of the game's very best single-target specs and MM being the absolute worst. It was STILL a relatively minor difference and SV was STILL very unpopular.
Seems to me that they are doing lazy maintenance and deciding, wisely, not to waste any more effort on a dead-on-arrival spec. These changes will do nothing for Survival. The existing options will in all likelihood still be the best ones (fat chance Chakrams, for example, suddenly becomes competitive) and the spec will suffer a lot with the loss of the azerite traits it heavily depends on.
Stupid suggestion so I didn't read the rest of them since they are in all likelihood equally as stupid.
There is literally no reason to restrict MM from summoning a pet. None. Not a single one of you proposing this idea can state why it should be done.