[Munitions] - The return of pre-Legion Survival as a modern spec

[F Rm]

Back in BC one hunter in the raid, the one with the highest AGI, would go Survival. Their DPS would go down a little in exchange for every physical damage spec getting a buff of 25% of that hunter's AGI as Attack Power every time that hunter crit.

And if you take a look at the Classic trees, most of the talents back then that affected abilities were aimed at the Melee ones and Traps. So you could argue that Survival was aimed more at melee and traps. So the Legion revamp just went back to that concept.

Not sure why you included that first bit about SV in BC, it has nothing to do with what you quoted, beyond the fact that, like I said, it did allow you to increase both your own damage, and others as well. As for that second part, about SV having talents that focused on melee, you ignore the fact that any such things were entirely situational, as melee itself for the class back then was a situational requirement. No matter what you choose back then, no matter which talent category you went into, it all was designed to add to the core class design, which in itself was primarily focusing on ranged combat. Melee was only utilized at times where you were forced into it due to the minimum attack range on ranged weapons.

And with that...

The problem with this statement is that it completely ignores the fact that Wrath not only saw a major philosophy change in class design, but also that there were the usual OP spec, a new stat, etc. that made people choose BM or MM over Survival regardless of any "core play style". This was actually when it started transforming into "Marksman, but with Magic Damage". The other confound in this was the fact that Survival's 41pt Talent, Explosive Shot, was not implemented correctly for a good chunk of the expansion. It was supposed to stack so if you landed one and it had 2 charges left when a second one landed, it would reset to 3 instead of 5. IT also got hit pretty hard with the Nerf Bat in Patch 3.1 with its base damage getting a 10% reduction and its Attack Power scaling reduced by 12.5%.

In Wrath they got rid of all the unique class buffs for groups. This was the heavy-handed start to "Bring the Player, Not the Class" which is why you barely saw any Survival hunters during the expansion since Expose Weakness was no longer a raid-wide buff but only for the hunter themselves. So there was no real reason to gimp your damage like there had been in Burning Crusade because Expose Weakness' buff for the raid would cause an overall damage increase where it was a loss in Wrath.

Most of us were playing 40/21/0 BM Hunters until that got nerfed because of PvP Crybabies whining about us having two Bestial Wrath uses every two minutes. When that happened, we switched to Marksman because it had great mobility with Aimed Shot no longer requiring you to stand still and such. Couple that with the Armor Penetration stat that most of us capped out by 3.3, there was no reason to play any other spec since the magic damage of Survival was not affected by ArP whereas the MM physical damage was.

...again, the melee aspects of Survival back then were also entirely situational, and not designed to make you want to shift your focus towards melee combat, over ranged combat. The core design philosophy for the hunter class back then was that each talent category focused on one part of the class fantasy as a whole. Beast Mastery - focused on pets and bestial aspects, Marksmanship(previously called Ranged Combat) - focused on your ranged weapons, and Survival(known early on as Outdoorsmanship) - focused primarily on utility/defensives, but also situational improvements to damage. They expanded on that a bit with for example Expose Weakness, but the core focus of that category as a whole was still on utility/defensives.

No matter which talent category you focused on, none of it heavily affected your core playstyle/priorities. Again, Core Specializations that were introduced with Cataclysm, while they were early versions of what we can see today, they were what they intended to allow us to focus on dedicated core playstyles/individual identities. Wrath began the shift towards these more focused identities, but it still did not have these dedicated core playstyles as options. Wrath did change things when it came to the philosophy of class design, yes, but it did not by any means amount to us having actual core specializations. Again, these came with Cataclysm.

The things you talk about with tuning and numbers are irrelevant to the actual philosophy of their approach to design. Same with what you said about class buffs, these have/had nothing to do with core playstyles and core identities. As for the actual value/validity of SV as a spec, and the functions of individual effects or abilities of the spec, in Wrath, feel free to check Bepples post above. I don't need to repeat what he said.

[Eosia]

The spec was still a Hunter and therefore had a ranged weapon it intended to use most of the time. The melee buffs were for situational usage. So the paradigm was entirely different to modern SV which lacks a ranged weapon and prefers to stick to melee for maximum damage. Saying that melee SV is representative of SV in Classic/BC has always been extremely incorrect and dishonest.

I never said it was, but it's ability buffing were aimed at melee only. Everything else was in the MM tree. If you played in Cataclysm, you'd know that those melee abilities went away, which is what cemented Survival going down the road and becoming "MM but with Magic Damage". Blizzard's rationale was most likely that

It also had more mobility because Aimed Shot no longer allowed you to move once again where it would remain since then with the lone exception of Patch 6.2 when the Tier 18 4pc bonus for Hunters removed the cast time again.

It's true that when the expansion launched BM was king due to being able to take Readiness and double up on Bestial Wraths. SV was extremely strong when 3.0 dropped but it got nerfed a couple times so it became mediocre but still relatively popular. The reason it got nerfed was because the original Explosive Shot actually did AoE damage on top of its single target. Having that much passive cleave back then was unheard of. So they nerfed it but shortly into WotLK they buffed Explosive Shot again and removed the AoE from it. The same patch (3.0.8) heavily nerfed BM and since MM hadn't really scaled to greatness yet most raiders actually started going SV.

Which proves the point that no one played Survival because of its core play style... it was the flavor of the month because it got buffed just as BM got nerfed. And when folks started getting higher ArP, they went MM especially after Patch 3.2.2 when the amount of ArP to gain 1% was nerfed by 12%.

[quote[P.S. The Explosive Shot thing you described wasn't a bug. It was just how DoTs worked back then; new applications would overwrite previous applications and you would lose the remaining ticks. Pandemic was the exception, not the norm. SV Hunters simply waited 0.5 secs between launching Explosive Shots.[/quote]

No, it was a bug but later got fixed.

[/quote]P.P.S. This line "This was actually when it started transforming into "Marksman, but with Magic Damage"." in particular is disingenuous. It implies that it was different/unique beforehand and turned into an MM clone later.[/quote]

No, because prior to Wrath it was a spec that actually only one hunter in a group would have taken anyways because of Expose Weakness. Once Blizzard nerfed it in Wrath by making it only apply to the Hunter versus all Hunters, Rogues, Warriors, Paladins, Feral Cat Druids, and Enhancement Shaman, they needed to change it so people would play it. Hence the "Marksman but with Magic Damage" motif.

Also no, it was because it was literally the same play style. You just swapped out abilities.

MM's Rotation:

Rapid Fire -> Kill Command -> Serpent Sting -> Chimera Shot -> Aimed Shot. Pop Readiness and repeat that. Then you just filled gaps with Steady Shot, popping Chimera on cooldown until Readiness came back up and then you repeated that opening sequence again). When the boss hit < 20% then you added in Kill Shot which you prioritized over Chimera.

Survival's Rotation:

Explosive Shot -> Kill Shot -> Serpent Sting -> Black Arrow -> Aimed Shot -> Steady Shot. The only thing really different was that Explosive Shot always should be on cool down, even if you had to interrupt a Steady Shot to pop it.

So basically they played the same. MM just had two cooldowns, Rapid Fire (5min) and Readiness (3min) that came into play. Survival just had Black Arrow (30 seconds). Both had to maintain Serpent Sting, both had one shot that hit like a truck (Chimera/Explosive), both used Steady Shot as filler, both weaved in Aimed Shot when everything was on CD and there was focus to spend, etc.

BM's was even more simplified than that, but it had the majority of the damage coming from the pet versus the hunter. Prior to Wrath, BM had other considerations to in regards to their pets. First and foremost they had to avoid "caster" pets at all costs. These were pets that had inferior stats (usually about 80-95% of their non-caster counterparts) compared to other pets, even within the same family. This was because these particular ones had higher Int/Spirit. They would also, at level 60, have ~20% less health and armor too. This was a bug as Classic does not have these types of pets and was fixed in Wrath.

In Vanilla they had the additional concern of pet attack speed too. This is why everyone had Broken Tooth tamed because it was the only pet outside of the bats in the Zul'Gurub raid that had 1.00 as their attack speed. This allowed their auto attacks to do 200% damage compared to other some other pets since they were attacking every second versus every two seconds. Patch 2.0 normalized them all to 2.00.

Also the whole "Marksman but with magic damage" line itself relies on the tired old shit take that any spec that uses a ranged weapon is automatically the same thing. That sort of overgeneralisation is never applied to other pure DPS classes so it's hypocritical and facetious when it gets applied to Hunters.

Other classes have had this problem as well, and Blizzard has differentiated them. Warlock is a good example. Demo is based on getting as many demons out as possible as long as possible to wail on the target. Destro is more fire-based burst damage and Affliction is a slow-ramp spec that focuses on stacking and maintaining Damage over Time effects. From Cataclysm until Legion, Destro even had its own resource and generation method (Burning Embers which Incinerate and such would build up in order to boost the damage of Chaos Bolt). I am not familiar with Mages or Rogues enough to speak to these classes.

Bringing back the melee abilities for Hunters and making Survival its own, unique spec, as well as also joining Shaman and Druid as the only classes that can be both melee and ranged. This makes it a unique spec especially since Melee and Ranged have vastly different play styles beyond the nominal one.

The bottom line though is people a) are playing the spec, and b) enjoying the spec. So no, it's not changing back. The Mage Tower coming back cemented that even further. Time to move on.

Not sure why you included that first bit about SV in BC, it has nothing to do with what you quoted, beyond the fact that, like I said, it did allow you to increase both your own damage, and others as well.

No, Survival was a net DPS loss to that hunter because all the buffs to the ranged abilities were in the MM tree and you could not go up that far to get them all since Expose Weakness was the goal until Wrath. The exchange was the increased DPS to the raid. Saw that demonstrated to hilarious effect in my guild in BC when people were complaining that our Survival Hunter was doing "too little" DPS. So they badgered the Guild Master about it and so between him and I, we gave the hunter the materials to switch to BM and his DPS went up. Then these same people started wondering why their DPS went down a lot more than the Hunter's went up.

...again, the melee aspects of Survival back then were also entirely situational, and not designed to make you want to shift your focus towards melee combat

The melee abilities were there actually because Hunters had a 0-5yd "dead zone" where they could not fire their weapon. You would Wing Clip/Raptor Strike and get back further depending on the context of the fight. Mostly it was a PvP thing since there was no reason for Hunters to be in Melee range of a boss. The deadzone was removed a later patch of BC.

Again, Core Specializations that were introduced with Cataclysm, while they were early versions of what we can see today, they were what they intended to allow us to focus on dedicated core playstyles/individual identities. Wrath began the shift towards these more focused identities, but it still did not have these dedicated core playstyles as options.

And that's where Survival started becoming "MM but with Magic Damage". You can deny it all you want, but it's the truth. When you can literally switch between specs and only 2-3 things on your bar changes and you're still hitting the buttons in roughly the same order and at the same timing, then they're the same core play style.

The things you talk about with tuning and numbers are irrelevant to the actual philosophy of their approach to design.

Yes they do, because since Survival and MM had identical core play styles, it all came down to which one did the most damage and people flocked to that one, usually referred to as the "flavor of the month".

[cocomen2]

MM's Rotation:

Rapid Fire -> Kill Command -> Serpent Sting -> Chimera Shot -> Aimed Shot. Pop Readiness and repeat that. Then you just filled gaps with Steady Shot, popping Chimera on cooldown until Readiness came back up and then you repeated that opening sequence again). When the boss hit < 20% then you added in Kill Shot which you prioritized over Chimera.

Survival's Rotation:

Explosive Shot -> Kill Shot -> Serpent Sting -> Black Arrow -> Aimed Shot -> Steady Shot. The only thing really different was that Explosive Shot always should be on cool down, even if you had to interrupt a Steady Shot to pop it.

So basically they played the same. MM just had two cooldowns, Rapid Fire (5min) and Readiness (3min) that came into play. Survival just had Black Arrow (30 seconds). Both had to maintain Serpent Sting, both had one shot that hit like a truck (Chimera/Explosive), both used Steady Shot as filler, both weaved in Aimed Shot when everything was on CD and there was focus to spend, etc.

Yes we know that old surv was too similar to MM, so they went from Surv almost copy of MM -> to Surv almost copy of BM.

(these dev people got paid for lazy job)




Still feel like Raxxar alike spec must be BM since he literally BEAST MASTER, while ranged surv should be kept as Trap master that uses frost-poison arrows and traps.

[Eosia]

Yes we know that old surv was too similar to MM, so they went from Surv almost copy of MM -> to Surv almost copy of BM.

Yeah, because Survival is currently a ranged spec with two pets... oh wait

[Unholyground]

I don't think old school survival is ever coming back now that there's class specific talent trees in which you can get explosive shot and some other things that used to be in the survival tree.

The only way it's coming back is if they put in like a single talent that allows you to use certain abilities at range but reduces their damage.

[F Rm]

Other classes have had this problem as well, and Blizzard has differentiated them. Warlock is a good example. Demo is based on getting as many demons out as possible as long as possible to wail on the target. Destro is more fire-based burst damage and Affliction is a slow-ramp spec that focuses on stacking and maintaining Damage over Time effects. From Cataclysm until Legion, Destro even had its own resource and generation method (Burning Embers which Incinerate and such would build up in order to boost the damage of Chaos Bolt). I am not familiar with Mages or Rogues enough to speak to these classes.

If you check the concept in the OP, you'll see that, while it does focus on the use of a ranged weapon, it would amount to a playstyle that is nothing alike what MM is currently, or looks to be like on the alpha. It's designed to focus on DoT maintenance/build-up, sustained cleave through multi-dot'ing or spreading DoTs, and situational burst via certain abilities or CDs.

Since you brought up Warlocks, I would like to point towards how, with different core themes between the classes ofc, Destruction/Affliction could be equated to the current situation we have here, comparing current MM, to what you can see in the concept I've proposed for what was RSV. Would new RSV have a different resource to MM? No, but that's not a blanket requirement to achieve a vastly different playstyle from another spec.

I'm not going to argue with you about what the specs were prior to Legion. I can only ask you to put your focus towards what current MM will be like in Dragonflight, and then compare that to what you can see in the concept I've proposed.

Bringing back the melee abilities for Hunters and making Survival its own, unique spec, as well as also joining Shaman and Druid as the only classes that can be both melee and ranged. This makes it a unique spec especially since Melee and Ranged have vastly different play styles beyond the nominal one.

It has never been just about melee vs ranged. If you think that, you don't really understand the context of all this. The act of making a spec melee doesn't automatically make it completely different from another. Current SV shares more abilities/effects with BM than RSV did with MM(they shared no signature abilities), in WoD.

The bottom line though is people a) are playing the spec, and b) enjoying the spec. So no, it's not changing back. The Mage Tower coming back cemented that even further. Time to move on.

I've never said that I want SV to be changed back to RSV. Some people do this, I don't. I simply want a modern version of old RSV back, one that has retained the core theme of the old spec, but allows us to further explore its thematic focus, like what I've suggested in the OP.

No, Survival was a net DPS loss to that hunter because all the buffs to the ranged abilities were in the MM tree and you could not go up that far to get them all since Expose Weakness was the goal until Wrath. The exchange was the increased DPS to the raid. Saw that demonstrated to hilarious effect in my guild in BC when people were complaining that our Survival Hunter was doing "too little" DPS. So they badgered the Guild Master about it and so between him and I, we gave the hunter the materials to switch to BM and his DPS went up. Then these same people started wondering why their DPS went down a lot more than the Hunter's went up.

I wasn't talking about your total throughput. I was talking about specific talents, their design. Again, please stop focusing on numbers. Numbers, for the most part, are irrelevant to the intent of design, current or past. Nothing of what you said there has anything to do with mechanical design or core identities, in connection to design.

The melee abilities were there actually because Hunters had a 0-5yd "dead zone" where they could not fire their weapon. You would Wing Clip/Raptor Strike and get back further depending on the context of the fight. Mostly it was a PvP thing since there was no reason for Hunters to be in Melee range of a boss. The deadzone was removed a later patch of BC.

• 0-5 yards was the melee range, where you couldn't use your ranged weapon, this is true.
• 8-35(+) yards was the distance where we could make use of our ranged weapons.
• The "deadzone" was the distance from 5-8 yards where we couldn't use any direct attacks at all, neither melee, nor ranged.

It was indeed mostly of relevance in PvP. Again, due to our design, you never really wanted to venture into melee, unless you were forced to do so, which is why I said that melee was, for the most part, situational(incl any such talents in the SV category).

And that's where Survival started becoming "MM but with Magic Damage". You can deny it all you want, but it's the truth. When you can literally switch between specs and only 2-3 things on your bar changes and you're still hitting the buttons in roughly the same order and at the same timing, then they're the same core play style.

When you say "MM but with magic damage" you imply that the actual abilities in each spec also worked the same, which they didn't. Core Specializations, in their early forms, were designed so that each one would provide a unique thematic, and mechanical focus. Just because you think that it wasn't enough to equate to for example a hybrid class(multiple combat roles), doesn't mean that they were the same.

Were they as different to one another as what we can see today? No, ofc not. That wasn't the intent with class/spec design philosophies in the past, ever. If you want to make that comparison, you have to do so with a version of SV that has the same depth and definition as all other specs do today.

Yes they do, because since Survival and MM had identical core play styles, it all came down to which one did the most damage and people flocked to that one, usually referred to as the "flavor of the month".

Do you actually know what "identical" means? It's enough to compare the signature abilities of MM/RSV to know that this statement is false. The comparison is between the abilities as they were in WoD.

Explosive Shot - Instant cast DoT, that dealt fire damage, with a short CD. The thematic design focused on the use of an augmented projectile.

Aimed Shot - Hardcast ability that deals heavy frontloaded damage. No cooldown. The thematic design focused on aiming your weapon/sharpshooting.

I don't think old school survival is ever coming back now that there's class specific talent trees in which you can get explosive shot and some other things that used to be in the survival tree.

The only way it's coming back is if they put in like a single talent that allows you to use certain abilities at range but reduces their damage.

If you look at my concept in the OP, while they have since made some changes to the design of the class tree on the alpha, what I said in regards to that tree can still easily be done, and none of that would be an issue.

[Bepples]

I never said it was, but it's ability buffing were aimed at melee only. Everything else was in the MM tree. If you played in Cataclysm, you'd know that those melee abilities went away, which is what cemented Survival going down the road and becoming "MM but with Magic Damage". Blizzard's rationale was most likely that

You did say it was. You said "So the Legion revamp just went back to that concept.". The Legion revamp did NOT make SV like it was before Cata because before Cata it primarily used a ranged weapon and Legion removed the ranged weapon.

I've played every expansion and evidently I have a far better recollection of how Hunter development worked than you do.

You're still implying that SV became more like MM with each passing expansion which is opposite to the truth. Are you a habitually dishonest person? It seems like it.

It also had more mobility because Aimed Shot no longer allowed you to move once again where it would remain since then with the lone exception of Patch 6.2 when the Tier 18 4pc bonus for Hunters removed the cast time again.

Let me tell you how it went because evidently you're having a tough time remembering.

Aimed Shot was an instant cast in WotLK, true, but it served a very different role in the rotation. Firstly, every spec took it as it was high enough in the MM tree for BM and SV to reach it. Secondly, it had a short cooldown so it was just a spell to use on cooldown in the rotation rather than a regular focus dump. Thirdly, all three specs had to use Steady Shot as a filler, which was an immobile cast, as well as having to at least stutter-step for Auto-Shot which was still immobile.

After WotLK it was made MM only and it became an immobile cast without a cooldown. MoP added a glyph that allowed it to be used while moving, and in WoD it was castable while moving baseline even before 6.2.

Aimed Shot wasn't just different for the mobility. It was a high focus, casted, big physical damage focus dump that played into MM's fantasy as a sniper and MM's gameplay of burst and build-up. Its presence in MM was a critical distinction between it and the far more rot-damage run-and-gun SV... or I guess "MM with magic" as you so facetiously call it.

Which proves the point that no one played Survival because of its core play style... it was the flavor of the month because it got buffed just as BM got nerfed. And when folks started getting higher ArP, they went MM especially after Patch 3.2.2 when the amount of ArP to gain 1% was nerfed by 12%.

Did you even read the post? SV remained popular throughout WotLK. It was still a popular pick in 3.3 when MM was numerically better. We can even see this on WotLK private servers and we will see it in WotLK classic.

If you want to see a spec people only pick for the damage, look at current melee SV. They had to buff it to be the best spec in the game for people to even consider it, and even then Hunters largely stick to BM and MM anyway.

You're also glossing over how you were totally wrong about SV's status in WotLK but I guess that's still better than doubling down on it.

No, it was a bug but later got fixed.

Bruh. Explosive Shot applied a DoT. All DoTs in the game worked that way before MoP (besides maybe Ignite, but I don't know when Blizzard updated that one). Putting up a new application would overwrite the previous application and you would lose the remaining ticks. That was intended.

Do you think snapshotting was a bug, too? When you put up a dot it would do a static amount of damage the whole duration which was based on what stats you had when you did the initial application. They later changed that one too so do you consider it a bug?

No, because prior to Wrath it was a spec that actually only one hunter in a group would have taken anyways because of Expose Weakness. Once Blizzard nerfed it in Wrath by making it only apply to the Hunter versus all Hunters, Rogues, Warriors, Paladins, Feral Cat Druids, and Enhancement Shaman, they needed to change it so people would play it. Hence the "Marksman but with Magic Damage" motif.

Lol? Expose Weakness was a passive debuff that had zero effect on your gameplay. The OP is right: you seem fixated on tuning. Before BC SV had exactly the same gameplay as MM. Not just "I can falsely equate each ability in the toolkit until they look the same" as you like to do. They cast the same abilities in the same rotation. After that they diverged in each and every expansion until they shared very little by MoP.

Also no, it was because it was literally the same play style. You just swapped out abilities.

This is not "literally" the same rotation. This is you equating two different specs and downplaying the differences. You're also fixating on WotLK again even though there were 3 expansions after that where SV was ranged and it grew more distinct in each one.

BM's was even more simplified than that, but it had the majority of the damage coming from the pet versus the hunter. Prior to Wrath, BM had other considerations to in regards to their pets. First and foremost they had to avoid "caster" pets at all costs. These were pets that had inferior stats (usually about 80-95% of their non-caster counterparts) compared to other pets, even within the same family. This was because these particular ones had higher Int/Spirit. They would also, at level 60, have ~20% less health and armor too. This was a bug as Classic does not have these types of pets and was fixed in Wrath.

In Vanilla they had the additional concern of pet attack speed too. This is why everyone had Broken Tooth tamed because it was the only pet outside of the bats in the Zul'Gurub raid that had 1.00 as their attack speed. This allowed their auto attacks to do 200% damage compared to other some other pets since they were attacking every second versus every two seconds. Patch 2.0 normalized them all to 2.00.

These pet differences applied to all Hunter specs, not just BM. In any case I'm not sure why you bothered to go into so much detail when it isn't relevant. BM also had the same rotation and abilities as MM and SV before WotLK. The only difference was it got a passive +20% haste. The Hunter specs strictly diverged each expansion; they never became more similar until BFA where they started giving melee SV a bunch of BM's stuff.

As for attack speed: they normalised pet damage by the end of classic. If you play a Hunter on Classic servers which are based on the last patch (1.12) Brokentooth does the same DPS as any other cat. The reason the higher speed was sought after was because it meant more pushback against casters in PvP.

Other classes have had this problem as well, and Blizzard has differentiated them.

In every other class ranged DPS stayed ranged DPS and melee DPS stayed melee DPS. Hunters are the ONLY class that saw a spec's role changed.

Bringing back the melee abilities for Hunters and making Survival its own, unique spec, as well as also joining Shaman and Druid as the only classes that can be both melee and ranged. This makes it a unique spec especially since Melee and Ranged have vastly different play styles beyond the nominal one.

And if they made MM have to do a 360 jump spin between every shot that would also make it unique and varied. It would be worse, but at least it would be unique, right? This should be a lesson that more unique does not always equate to better and Survival is a perfect example of that. By making it melee they ruined its identity, theme, and coherence, and they turned it into a pariah spec which most Hunters avoid. It would have been far better off if it remained ranged.

In any case, it's only "more unique" within the confines of the Hunter class. When you consider all the game's specs it's much less unique now because there are already lots of melee specs while Hunters are the only ones that use ranged weapons.

The bottom line though is people a) are playing the spec, and b) enjoying the spec. So no, it's not changing back. The Mage Tower coming back cemented that even further. Time to move on.

It was routinely the least played spec in the game until they bribed everyone to play it with overpowered uncapped AoE and even that's not lasting. So evidently it's not going as fine as you think it is.

Far more people played and enjoyed ranged Survival and evidently that didn't matter to Blizzard. So that's not a factor in whether they decide to change it back. What we need is a change in leadership of class design, particularly for Hunters, and our class has needed that for a long time since the class has more or less stagnated or outright declined since WoD. The complete dumpster fire that is the SV tree in Dragonflight is proof of that.

The melee abilities were there actually because Hunters had a 0-5yd "dead zone" where they could not fire their weapon. You would Wing Clip/Raptor Strike and get back further depending on the context of the fight. Mostly it was a PvP thing since there was no reason for Hunters to be in Melee range of a boss. The deadzone was removed a later patch of BC.

That's correct. So do you think SV from Legion onwards is representative of that playstyle like you originally said?

And that's where Survival started becoming "MM but with Magic Damage". You can deny it all you want, but it's the truth. When you can literally switch between specs and only 2-3 things on your bar changes and you're still hitting the buttons in roughly the same order and at the same timing, then they're the same core play style.

By WoD they were very different and even if they did nothing to SV it would have still ended up more distinct because they reworked MM as well in Legion. So your quadrupling down on the juvenile "MM with magic damage" spam means nothing.

Yes they do, because since Survival and MM had identical core play styles, it all came down to which one did the most damage and people flocked to that one, usually referred to as the "flavor of the month".

Even if we accept that to be true, which it isn't, do you seriously believe SV has been in a better place post-rework? Because as it stands it sure seems like the only time anyone will ever consider playing SV is when it's absolutely broken, whereas that's not true for the other Hunter specs or even SV when it was ranged.

Yeah, because Survival is currently a ranged spec with two pets... oh wait

Using a melee weapon doesn't magically make it acceptable to clone half of BM's toolkit. It's excessively leaning on BM's identity and that exposes all the "we made SV melee to make it unique!" talk to be the lie it always was.

[Dadwen]

Amazing that Blizzard keeps doubling down on a stupid ideas (just from what I pick up from the Blizzard forums MSV is only being played now *first time not scraping the bottom of the barrel of the least played spec's is due to being a bit over-buffed (added borrowed powers or something of the sorts and AOE) and the funny thing some people keep trying to defend such a bad idea.

Blizzard: we made a product that less people like than the previous version.... lets keep doing it....

[The Stormbringer]

If they were to bring back Ranged Survival, I would hope they would do what they did with Feral and split it into two specs. Alternatively, have something similar to Gladiator Stance that allows for swapping between Ranged and Melee, empowering and changing certain abilities depending on which one you're at.

[Pauper]

If they where to bring back RSV (and that is a BIG "IF") I would rather see it as its own tree. The empowering certain abilities whether you go melee or ranged does sound intriguing but for a small indie company like blizz idk...

[Theangryone]

Nah, survival is fine as it is.

[F Rm]

Have made the tree available in a calculator for the concept seen in the OP. Feel free to check it out.

Download TTM(TalentTreeManager) here: https://github.com/TobiasM95/WoW-Talent-Tree-Manager (Not made by me)

After it's installed, start it up. Once it is, click on the + to open a new tab. This makes a small pop-up window appear, in which you can choose to import a preset from an existing spec/class, or you can import a custom one. To get the concept above imported, copy-paste the code in the link below, all of it, into the custom import box and click 'Import Tree'.

Link for the code(scroll down the page and copy-paste the code in the "Raw Paste Data" window): https://pastebin.com/pxjdj0wx

PS. Don't mind the scuffed icons that were used. The talent manager does not have all icons from the game on file, so I had to use whatever was available.

[Bepples]

Nah, survival is fine as it is.

It really isn't.

For starters, it has zero design direction whatsoever and is excessively borrowing/stealing from BM's identity.

There's a whole list of reasons the melee rework hasn't worked out but we can start with that.

[Pauper]

Nah, survival is fine as it is.

Agreed, its not perfect but I am happy with MSV for the most part. That being said there is nothing wrong with tossing out further ideas. Do I see blizz ever adding a 4th spec-if I am being honest I don't think that will likely ever happen but you know the old saying "never say never". I will say the ideas in this thread make more sense than the occasional "I think Necromancer/Runemaster/Engineer should be class and here are the talents I made up etc..." threads you see occasionally.

[Rustov]

Oh hey, thanks for the tool. I wanted to build something like this but my coding skills aren't up to snuff yet. I'll see what I can cook up.

[Makaloff]

Amazing that Blizzard keeps doubling down on a stupid ideas (just from what I pick up from the Blizzard forums MSV is only being played now *first time not scraping the bottom of the barrel of the least played spec's is due to being a bit over-buffed (added borrowed powers or something of the sorts and AOE) and the funny thing some people keep trying to defend such a bad idea.

Blizzard: we made a product that less people like than the previous version.... lets keep doing it....

not really suprised, hunter design have been garbage ever since legion. whoever is in charge for hunter design have no clue of what to do with the class, even less about its history, which is sad beacuse hunters used to be so much fun to play. Take wotlk for example, it has wonderful design for classes (not completly without issues but which expac is without issues XD), all the hunter speccs play nice and have very different distinctions. same for other classes, they feel nice to play and have a rotation that flows well, it was long ago i felt the same on retail.

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Agreed, its not perfect but I am happy with MSV for the most part. That being said there is nothing wrong with tossing out further ideas. Do I see blizz ever adding a 4th spec-if I am being honest I don't think that will likely ever happen but you know the old saying "never say never". I will say the ideas in this thread make more sense than the occasional "I think Necromancer/Runemaster/Engineer should be class and here are the talents I made up etc..." threads you see occasionally.

question is if they do, how many expansions more will we have to wait? blizzard loves doubling down on bad ideas instead of fixing them (took us 3 expansions to get rid of borrowed power, not to mention the stupid shit they pulled in SL with covenants and all that crap). The sad part is unless leadership changes, i dont think they will ever revert it to ranged again, only hope is that they can atleast find 1 braincell to use to design MM and BM to not feel completly garbage to play.

[F Rm]

If they were to bring back Ranged Survival, I would hope they would do what they did with Feral and split it into two specs. Alternatively, have something similar to Gladiator Stance that allows for swapping between Ranged and Melee, empowering and changing certain abilities depending on which one you're at.

I'd hope that they decide to bring it back as a 4th spec option. Make Serpent Sting the starting(freebee) talent for ranged SV in the class tree, and add a specific talent tree for the spec.

If they where to bring back RSV (and that is a BIG "IF") I would rather see it as its own tree.

Yep, agreed.

Nah, survival is fine as it is.

Can't speak for everyone ofc, but I have no intention to remove current SV.

Agreed, its not perfect but I am happy with MSV for the most part. That being said there is nothing wrong with tossing out further ideas. Do I see blizz ever adding a 4th spec-if I am being honest I don't think that will likely ever happen but you know the old saying "never say never". I will say the ideas in this thread make more sense than the occasional "I think Necromancer/Runemaster/Engineer should be class and here are the talents I made up etc..." threads you see occasionally.

It's ofc very unlikely that they'll ever do it, but hey, crazier things have happened throughout WoW's history.

question is if they do, how many expansions more will we have to wait? blizzard loves doubling down on bad ideas instead of fixing them (took us 3 expansions to get rid of borrowed power, not to mention the stupid shit they pulled in SL with covenants and all that crap). The sad part is unless leadership changes, i dont think they will ever revert it to ranged again, only hope is that they can atleast find 1 braincell to use to design MM and BM to not feel completly garbage to play.

We saw a shift in their mindset/philosophies with 9.2, sort of. Much of that is reflected in their approach to DF development as well. More can ofc be done, but hopefully they continue down that road. Seeing something like this for DF is...out of the question probably. But yeah, fingers crossed for what comes after.

[F Rm]

Changed the tooltip for the talent "Inferno". To clarify how it's supposed to work.

It now reads:

[Inferno] - Increases damage dealt by Immolation Trap by 5/10%.

Whenever an enemy triggers Immolation Trap, or if an enemy that is affected by Explosive Shot is within, or if you hit an enemy with Cluster Shot within 10 yards of an armed Immolation Trap, this will set off the trap, causing a wave of fire to engulf all nearby enemies within 12 yards of the trap.

Targets hit by the wave take instant Fire damage equal to 20/40% of the total effect of Immolation Trap, and another 30/60% over a period of 10 sec.

Note: The change/clarification is the last section, talking about damage dealt with the initial wave + the periodic effect that is applied by it. The intent is that, with a further investment of points, you will be able to much more easily apply Immolation Trap to a target, and more importantly, it will also allow you to do so to multiple targets at once, if they're close enough. And it will allow the trap to deal its full damage over a shorter period compared to the default, for situations where that could be useful.


Changed the choice node for Munition Tactics: Black Arrow, in row 7. It is now a choice node providing the talents below, new talent added called Soulflay:

Choice node, pick one of the following two talents

[Munition Tactics: Black Arrow] - Any time Explosive Shot deals damage to a target affected by Black Arrow, during Munition Tactics, this will cause the periodic damage effect applied by Black Arrow to spread to nearby enemies as well.

[Soulflay] - Increases the base duration of Black Arrow by 4 sec.

Black Arrow increases all damage you deal to the affected target by 15% while Munition Tactics is active.

[F Rm]

As the initial rework of this concept was done early on in the development stages of the Dragonflight Alpha, only a few other class/spec trees had been showcased at that point. And thus, we had a fairly limited view of how they would set out to compile their trees, talking tree structure, pathing, restrictions, etc.

With what they’ve implemented since, with new trees coming up, and changes are being made to existing ones, I wanted to compose an alternative layout/structure of this tree as well. Most of the individual talents are the same as with the previous version, although a few changes have been made, such as point reductions, a few adjustments to specific tooltips, and more. Mostly, it’s the general structure that has changed, incl talent positions.

For anyone that’s interested, feel free to compare the two versions and tell me which one you think would be the one to go with. Both versions are available to be viewed in TTM(TalentTreeManager).

• Old layout - Import data
• New layout - Import data

Image of the new layout: https://imgur.com/9hdXABq