They Should Not Remove The Ability For Hunters To Be Melee

[Donkeywing]

It's not going to get removed, they've invested too much time into the spec. If they were going to remove it they wouldve done it already. Bringing back an old version of sv now would require a lot of effort for various reasons.

The melee hunter drama is a monument to their incompetence of game design decisions and basic understanding of their game. The game didn't need more melee and there's no inherent value to sv hunter other than ''being in melee with your pet''. Its just a generic weak melee spec that has never been popular untill this patch. It made hunter a 2spec class for many.
Remember that we couldve had a new cool creative/unique spec instead of them wasting time on this trash, such as dark ranger for example. That would be way more interesting than another shitty melee spec barely anyone took interest in for years.

[Eosia]

The thing with for example DK etc is that their speccs were never changed in terms what role they had (aside from DK where blizzard took a long time to decide which specc should be tank). i mean, a fury/arms warr will always be meele, sure the specc have changed alot since back in time but it still performs same role. Saying that "you have 2 ranged speccs to choose from" when we used to have 3 to choose from, is rather ignorant id say.

once again my point is that they TOOK AWAY THE SPECC, and no, i dont want to take away meele from current survival, beacuse that would mean that those who enjoy meele surv would be upset and i dont want them to experience the frustration as the RSV players did. I argue for a talent to go meele or ranged for survival, or even introducing RSV as a 4th specc. Im not here to remove current survival, im here to try to find a solution that can make both sides happy.

No, they didn't. They changed a spec that was redundant of another spec and created a completely unique spec. Warlocks went through something similar too with the DoTs becoming almost exclusively the domain of Affliction and turning Demonology into was pure pet-based spec and Destruction became a spec more like MM, even going so far as to give them a different resource than Demo/Aff.

Besides, what if i dont want to play MM or BM?

Then you don't really want to play a Hunter.

like the talent could work that way it replaces carve with multishot, bombs with explosive shot, SS stays as is, raptor strike turns into cobra shot etc. i believe it go a long way to make both sides happy without taking away options for people.

And you expect them to reduce the cooldown on Counter Shot to 15 seconds like the Survival interrupt is? Not going to happen. Ranged DPS has long interrupt CDs for a reason, hence why usually they are first or last in a raid group's interrupt rotation so that whenever the rest of the folks of the rotation have used theirs, the interrupt is up again.

So it's not so simple as "Replace X with Y". And you're still ignoring the folks who actually like Survival as it is. I am having fun playing it right now because it is a completely different play style from BM/MM and it actually does completely change fights for Hunters being up close and personal.

You're also forgetting that there are only two other classes (I goofed earlier and only cited one), Druid and Shaman, that can switch between melee and ranged. While it has been downgraded a bit since Wrath, the "Bring the player, not the class" thing still in effect. So if a raid group has too much Melee or too much Ranged, a hunter can switch. And yes, certain mechanics do require a certain number like the Mal'ganis/Kin'tessa fight in Sepulcher. Not enough ranged means the DoT/Fear circles might end up in Melee which can cause major problems because it has to give a certain number of them out based on raid size. Because otherwise you just go in with all melee DPS and Monk/Paladin healers and you'd negate the mechanic.

[Wylyth1992]

It literally plays like a worse BM with the added barrier you're melee not ranged - why should it exist? Because you want to be a hunter with a spear?

In short, yes. I want to be able to fight with my pet at melee range.

[Ragedaug]

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

100% agree. BM or a 4th spec should have been melee. It was a mistake to make Survival the melee spec. Guessing it was 'cause they originally put all the melee talents in the Survival tree, which makes sense...but when they made the big changes to Survival like they did in Wrath, they should have left it as a ranged spec.

[Makaloff]

No, they didn't. They changed a spec that was redundant of another spec and created a completely unique spec. Warlocks went through something similar too with the DoTs becoming almost exclusively the domain of Affliction and turning Demonology into was pure pet-based spec and Destruction became a spec more like MM, even going so far as to give them a different resource than Demo/Aff.



Then you don't really want to play a Hunter.



And you expect them to reduce the cooldown on Counter Shot to 15 seconds like the Survival interrupt is? Not going to happen. Ranged DPS has long interrupt CDs for a reason, hence why usually they are first or last in a raid group's interrupt rotation so that whenever the rest of the folks of the rotation have used theirs, the interrupt is up again.

So it's not so simple as "Replace X with Y". And you're still ignoring the folks who actually like Survival as it is. I am having fun playing it right now because it is a completely different play style from BM/MM and it actually does completely change fights for Hunters being up close and personal.

You're also forgetting that there are only two other classes (I goofed earlier and only cited one), Druid and Shaman, that can switch between melee and ranged. While it has been downgraded a bit since Wrath, the "Bring the player, not the class" thing still in effect. So if a raid group has too much Melee or too much Ranged, a hunter can switch. And yes, certain mechanics do require a certain number like the Mal'ganis/Kin'tessa fight in Sepulcher. Not enough ranged means the DoT/Fear circles might end up in Melee which can cause major problems because it has to give a certain number of them out based on raid size. Because otherwise you just go in with all melee DPS and Monk/Paladin healers and you'd negate the mechanic.

yea but the thing with warlock was that their role never changed, its still ranged. Uniqness doesnt have to mean you change the role completly of a specc, and thats were the issue with survival lies. People didnt mind the rework, they minded that it turned into meele with no option to play it as ranged.

As for the countershot, no i wouldnt reduce it to 15, it would be 24 seconds like BM and MM has.
I know there is people that like current survival, that is why i advocate for RSV being a 4th specc or avaible as a talent option to specc into, hence letting people choose if they want to play the ranged or meele version of survival. Im not here to take away meele survival, im here to argue for a option that could make both sides happy.

I want to play my hunter, ive been a hunter main since 2007, but current MM and BM isnt satisfying to play and i dont want to play meele hunter so thats why ive rerolled this time around. Im waiting for the talents and gameplay for DF to see if MM can be worth picking up again to play since current MM is way too clunky.

Aye thats true but the thing is that both feral and enhancement been meele since start and with every class added have been meele, and hunter traditionally been ranged, which means that there is way more meele speccs to choose between that can cover the meele spots better than what a meele hunter can. But this also points a design flaw when it comes to design since DF is the first time since the start of the game that we see a ranged specc introduced.

So the issue not only lies with the rework itself to meele but also that meele surv dont really bring anything that another meele cant (except from lust and uncapped aoe). But like i said, i think the best option would be to have a talent that lets people choose to play meele or ranged and then add onto some more utlity onto the specc could solve alot of the things regarding survival.

Beacuse in the end of the day, i dont want to take away meele surv for anyone, im just trying to find a middle ground that everybody could win on without taking away from either or other side.

[Eosia]

I want to play my hunter, ive been a hunter main since 2007, but current MM and BM isnt satisfying to play and i dont want to play meele hunter so thats why ive rerolled this time around. Im waiting for the talents and gameplay for DF to see if MM can be worth picking up again to play since current MM is way too clunky.

Then I repeat... you do not want to play Hunter. Real people stick with the classes and make them work. You weren't around when hunters got castrated in 2006 in Patch 2.0.3. They were rebalanced for level 70 before level 70 was even possible. All because people were crying because they were getting annihilated during the Great AV Grind of the Welfare Warlords/Grand Marshals, something literally would have zero meaning in about a month from then.

The Real Hunters stuck it out and made it work.

Beacuse in the end of the day, i dont want to take away meele surv for anyone, im just trying to find a middle ground that everybody could win on without taking away from either or other side.

At the end of the day, they're not going to do it. They brought back the Mage Tower already and it is now timeless content. They're NOT going to redo it AGAIN because a bunch of people whined enough about Survival.

Survival is now Melee. Deal with it.

[Worgar]

Funny how blizzard managed to make every other pure dps spec in the game distinct on both a gameplay and visual level, except for survival, going into legion. Instead they just objectively handicapped it and called it a day.

[cparle87]

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

[Bepples]

I like the feel and class fantasy of it, and I'm sure many others do.

lol

Firstly, Hunters already have the "ability" to be melee. BM and MM can do damage in melee range just fine. SV doesn't represent added "ability" to the Hunter class.

What it represents is use of melee weapons. That's a purely aesthetic/fantasy choice and its fine to have a preference for that, but a) there are already a lot of specs that represent that including specifically physical melee specs (there are 5 others in fact), b) it came at the expense of a popular ranged spec, and c) it's possible to represent melee in the class without making one of its specs unable to use a ranged weapon and thus denying it the most iconic selling point of the class.

So, screw anyone who wants to play as a Melee Hunter, right?

... I mean... that's exactly how it went for ranged Survival fans. What makes you more important/special?

In short, yes. I want to be able to fight with my pet at melee range.

BM can still do that.

The individual mechanics of the shots were different, like how MM had to reapply Serpent Sting where as Cata Survival only had to apply it once since Cobra Shot would refresh it, but it's basically the same. You have a shot hierarchy and you followed it and you could move around. When Aimed Shot had its cast time added back you lost the mobility

No, it's not "basically the same". The use of physical damage and hardcasted Aimed Shot instead of run-and-gun rot damage with Explosive Shot and Serpent Sting is a substantial difference. You also ignore mechanical differences like SV's Lock and Load and how it interacted with traps (you know; back when SV was meant to be the utilitarian spec with enhanced trapping and the like), how Serpent String had several SV-specific enhancements, and how WoD made many abilities spec-specific including Serpent Sting, Arcane Shot, and Kill Shot. If you want to compare the similarity of specs to justify a decision made in Legion you need to look at the expansion immediately before Legion i.e. WoD.

But never mind all that. Let's accept for a moment that they were too similar. I think that's fallacious and incorrect, but let's assume it for a second. How is making SV melee the optimal solution? You're automatically assuming that so you think proving that SV and MM are similar is enough. It's not.

Making SV melee required an enormous undertaking which derailed Hunter class development in both Legion and BFA. It denied Hunters that utilitarian special munitions fantasy that's present in so many other RPGs in exchange for a highly niche melee fantasy with no coherent theme or direction. It necessitates SV borrowing and stealing elements of BM's identity which puts the whole "we want to make the specs unique!" angle into question. And of course it alienated most Hunter players and caused years of division on the forums.

Instead of taking that route they could have just iterated on SV as a ranged spec. It was already distinct from the other specs by WoD and was only in need of some more baseline mechanical interaction. Going into Legion BM and MM were heavily changed anyway so even something similar to the WoD iteration would be even more distinct on its own, but they could have gone in the direction of something *truly* unique for Hunters like multidotting/funnel cleaving. It would have taken far less effort for a far better result. Making the spec melee was about the worst approach they could have taken short of making it a tank or something.

And no one cares if you didn't come to hunter to play melee. You just don't pick survival then.

You can imagine how this falls flat for people who mained ranged Survival. People who didn't like it or found it to be interchangeable with other Hunter specs could have just gotten lost in one of the plentiful other melee specs in the game. Instead Survival was turned upside down just for them. There is no "live and let live" when it comes to SV. Blizzard put ground-up spec transformations on the table when they made it melee so that's why this discussion persists into perpetuity.

Because you state everything with "I". You cite absolutely no sources whatsoever that show that players who main hunter dislike Survival as a melee so much they'd gut the spec to get Magic MM back.

Blizzard themselves said that they knew most Hunters wouldn't like melee Survival and they were angling for new players and rerolls. Here's the interview:

https://warcraft.blizzplanet.com/blo...-3-interview/2

SV Hunter is also routinely a very unpopular spec since becoming melee. 9.2 is an exception but evidently because of the massive overtuning sent SV's way; most Hunters are still sticking to BM/MM despite that even though before Legion SV being overpowered would quickly lead it to becoming the most played spec in the game.

Wrath was actually the start of the decline for Survival IMO.

...huh!?? Did you play back then at all? Hardly anyone cared about SV in Classic and BC. Like you said their only relevance was Expose Weakness. You spend so much time trying to prove that ranged SV was the same as MM in Cata onwards; how about the fact that in BC SV didn't even have any unique damaging abilities? WotLK is what started the divergence of SV from MM and BM. It was a massive success and made SV one of the most popular specs and it only continued to iterate and diverge from WotLK onwards.

At the end of WoD we were all either BM or MM because of the T18 4P bonus which made it play like Wrath again since it removed Aimed Shot's cast time. You forget Blizzard keeps tons upon tons of metrics from the servers. They know what everyone is doing and has done.

This implication that SV was an unpopular spec based on T18 is an extremely weak argument. We still have raid representation data for much of WotLK to WoD and we can see that SV was routinely one of the more popular specs. It even had a couple tiers where it was the most represented spec in the entire game.

Heres a blog post from that period with some old representation data:

https://cynwise.wordpress.com/2014/0...r-patch-5-4-2/

T18 was an exception, not the rule. SV was underplayed because of a number of factors, not least because they nerfed the spec to hell. T18 also released just 1 month before Legion and melee SV were announced so evidently the work was already underway. SV falling off in T18 (which, again, Blizzard directly and deliberately caused) is certainly not the reason they looked to remaking SV. More likely they were making the spec bad because they didn't want people to continue being attached to it leading up to remaking it in Legion. It sounds paranoid but they did exactly that to Demonology in the same patch and they even admitted to it in that case.

The decision to make 10/25man raid sizes in Wrath were proof of that. They made this error based on the fact that Karazhan was the most popular raid in all of Burning Crusade. They thought it was because it was 10 man instead of the fact that it was just a great raid in and of itself regardless of the size. And that error lead to some problems.

That was not an error, for one. The 10/25 split was a good thing. Accommodating small raid sizes is actually healthy for an MMO. What wasn't good was losing the incentive to do 25 man in Cataclysm. They addressed that problem with Warforged items in MoP and it actually worked quite well for a time but then they threw it all away in WoD. That was the real error.

Warlocks went through something similar too with the DoTs becoming almost exclusively the domain of Affliction and turning Demonology into was pure pet-based spec and Destruction became a spec more like MM, even going so far as to give them a different resource than Demo/Aff.

So what you're saying is you have an all-ranged class with 3 specs:
- One spec focuses on pets
- One spec focuses on hardcasted upfront burst damage
- One spec focuses on sustained rot damage

Sounds familiar...

You're also forgetting that there are only two other classes (I goofed earlier and only cited one), Druid and Shaman, that can switch between melee and ranged. While it has been downgraded a bit since Wrath, the "Bring the player, not the class" thing still in effect. So if a raid group has too much Melee or too much Ranged, a hunter can switch. And yes, certain mechanics do require a certain number like the Mal'ganis/Kin'tessa fight in Sepulcher.

This doesn't happen nearly enough to call it a positive. Before that Sepulcher fight you have to go all the way back to Gul'dan in Legion for something similar. SV being melee is an oppresive negative for the spec in the overwhelming number of cases. Even most SV fans admit this.

They will not remove melee hunters, no one cares about old survival, it was too similar to the other two specs. There's some people here who want it back but it's not like the opinion of people who don't play the game is important.

See above. Not only was it not too similar, but they could have easily made it more distinct with just a little more unique mechanical interaction like what they were already adding around WoD.

Also, given that WoW has lost a huge amount of players I'd say Blizzard ought to listen to the opinion of people who don't play anymore more often. In any case plenty of people who still play want to see a ranged SV.

Oh yes for sure, everyone is ok with more specs, but there's people demanding the removal of melee survival in favor of old survival, which was so similar to the other specs that it got straight out removed.

It got removed because they put a bunch of clueless melee-favouring developers in charge who think specs using a ranged weapon makes them all the same. They demonstrated their cluelessness throughout Legion and BFA, for example by desiging BM in Legion to have significant downtime because "BM Hunters need time to manage their pet". In case you think they've gotten any better, in a recent interview they claimed MM's strength in the Hunter class was spread cleave.

Here's an idea: don't put people who don't play Hunters in charge of the Hunter class and maybe we would stop seeing Hunter class design decisions made to explicitly appeal to people other than Hunters i.e. melee Survival.

It was a lot of fun leveling through Vanilla with a Hunter. Bring back the flavor.

Most of that "flavour" you describe is just archaic and poorly thought out mechanics that made the class worse to play. For example, the reason it revolved around Auto Shot timing was because Auto Shot did most of the damage and was clipped/delayed by other attacks. Also your instant cast spells Arcane Shot and Serpent Sting scaled with spell damage instead of ranged attack power and were therefore never worth using, especially when we used mana like a caster instead of focus.

I don't think the universe needs to revolve around Auto Attack to make it feel different to a caster. On retail right now I would say Hunter feels like less of a caster than Classic/TBC, mainly due to the use of focus instead of mana.

Really with the new talent trees coming in dragon flight they should just give choices to make MM play like old Survival by lowering aimed shot damage with a global increase to dot damage and giving it mobility and re adding black arrow given that MM already had serpent sting and explosive shot.

Here’s really no reason to touch survival at all when with just some talent choices you can remake the play style within MM.

This has always been a bad idea. MM and ranged SV were separate identities and concepts. Cramming them both into the same spec is like cramming Affliction and Destruction into the same spec; you just end up with a watered down version of both instead of one complete spec.

Given that melee Hunter is very niche, it comes across as a spectacularly unfair "compromise" for melee SV fans to keep everything they want while ranged SV fans have to do all the compromising and accommodating.

[Hctaz]

Most of that "flavour" you describe is just archaic and poorly thought out mechanics that made the class worse to play. For example, the reason it revolved around Auto Shot timing was because Auto Shot did most of the damage and was clipped/delayed by other attacks. Also your instant cast spells Arcane Shot and Serpent Sting scaled with spell damage instead of ranged attack power and were therefore never worth using, especially when we used mana like a caster instead of focus.

I don't think the universe needs to revolve around Auto Attack to make it feel different to a caster. On retail right now I would say Hunter feels like less of a caster than Classic/TBC, mainly due to the use of focus instead of mana.

I wouldn't say that the flavor I was referencing was archaic due to bad design. The flavor I was referencing at one point or another is archaic because leveling is archaic.
My post was long enough without getting into more specifics, so I failed to elaborate on some of the points I had in my head and ended up kinda getting side tracked.
I also think the statement of bringing the flavor back was pointless as basically every class can do world content about as good as any other class. There's no true disparity like there was in Vanilla, so there's no point in bringing back any flavor.

The point of me bringing up their amazing capabilities in open world content in Vanilla was basically to explain why they also didn't have a fun and/or powerful design when it came to end game PvE content. I think the idea behind their design was good in theory, but they couldn't implement a fully completed idea as that would run the risk of making them "over-powered" in the eyes of the developers who were creating Vanilla WoW's balance around the idea of this fully encompassing living world where every activity from leveling, to low level dungeons, to raids, to PvP were all something that you would experience in some way or another. Modern WoW has not been like that in a very long time.

Basically, I'd say Vanilla Hunters were complete in terms of capturing the essence of what an archer would be but they did not have nearly enough mechanical depth to make them interesting as a result of Blizzard's choice to design their balance around things like open world questing.

What I will say in terms of my argument towards giving Hunters more of a diversified feeling than just simply being another caster class is that I think that they could possibly benefit from the Evoker's new mechanic of holding down buttons for a pseudo cast time. I think not restricting hunters to having mandatory cast times whatsoever could be interesting as long as they balanced them around the fact that holding the buttons down for their full duration would always be the highest form of Patchwerk DPS output you could have.

I would want this to be different than the way the Evoker handles it. From the way Blizzard has talked about the mechanic for that class, it sounds like some of the decisions you make will actually be more situational and possibly utility based such as a spell potentially changing from a single target blast to an AoE blast should you charge it.
I would just simply stick to raw DPS output for Hunters if they decided to implement such a mechanic. Marksmen don't hold their shots in order to make them explode when they land versus them not exploding when they land, but lining up the perfect shot is something that has been done for as long as ranged weapons have existed for humans. When you've got an angry animal charging straight at you, you don't want to shoot wildly 5 times and then get gored, you want to shoot it right between the eyes one time and take it down.

That would solve all the flavor issue that I have with modern Hunters I think aside from the fact that they lack a magical based DPS spec... sorta... MM is an abomination of mixed design as it currently stands, but I'd like to see it go back to being purely physical and having Survival reintroduced as a Fourth spec that is magic/DoT focused again.

[Makaloff]

Then I repeat... you do not want to play Hunter. Real people stick with the classes and make them work. You weren't around when hunters got castrated in 2006 in Patch 2.0.3. They were rebalanced for level 70 before level 70 was even possible. All because people were crying because they were getting annihilated during the Great AV Grind of the Welfare Warlords/Grand Marshals, something literally would have zero meaning in about a month from then.

The Real Hunters stuck it out and made it work.




At the end of the day, they're not going to do it. They brought back the Mage Tower already and it is now timeless content. They're NOT going to redo it AGAIN because a bunch of people whined enough about Survival.

Survival is now Melee. Deal with it.

i werent around in 2006 beacuse i didnt start playing until 2007, i litterly didnt know the game exsisted in 2006. So just beacuse i find the current design atrocious and rerolled for the first time since 2007 im not a real hunter player? Ive been sticking with my hunter throught thick and thin, even in 1st patch of SL i played hunter. in S2 i quit due SL being terrible and rn the specc just clunky to play and i have ran out of options when it comes to my hunter. Like ive said before, for me, MM is way too clunky to play atm, BM have never been my thing really (i did play it briefly in BFA due MM was in such shoddy state that it was sad) and survival is a meele specc.

So thats why i rerolled after playing hunter for 14 years, saying to my face im not a "real" hunter player beacuse i rerolled 1 patch is really wierd statement. If i didnt care about the hunter class or mained it, do you think i would spend my time here on the forums discussing the class?

Once again, im not advocating them to take away meele hunter, im advocating them to give us a CHOICE to play the specc either as ranged or meele. Blizzard created a situation that wasnt nessecery beacuse they impletemented the idea in a bad way, thats why its being discussed so many years down the line. I know they wont make survival ranged again, but that doesnt mean they cant include a talent option so you could play it ranged. It would litterly be a win win for everyone, people who wanna play meele do so, those who wanna play ranged do so. no need to be so narrow and tell people to "deal with it" when they actually trying to make both sides happy.

Besides, blizzard knew meele hunter would be a very niche thing, so they already knew before hand that it wouldnt be well received by the hunters. But like i said, im trying to create a solution, not take away from either or other side.

[sunxsera]

So, screw anyone who wants to play as a Melee Hunter, right?

We didn' t get asked either. ¯\_(ツ) _/¯
In another thread you said you didn't even manage to lvl one character to max lvl since legion - which means you don't even know sv endgame & the problems it had over the years as melee.

[Lorgar Aurelian]

This has always been a bad idea. MM and ranged SV were separate identities and concepts. Cramming them both into the same spec is like cramming Affliction and Destruction into the same spec; you just end up with a watered down version of both instead of one complete spec.

Given that melee Hunter is very niche, it comes across as a spectacularly unfair "compromise" for melee SV fans to keep everything they want while ranged SV fans have to do all the compromising and accommodating.

Mm and Sv were incredibly similar with the main difference being hard cast damage vs magic dot damage and Mobility, these differences can be made up for with talents in the new tree with out taking away thing away from MM as the with actual trees they can just add more nodes without sticking to the X rows of 3 choices design.

The only realistic downside would be that no matter how balanced it is one style will always be stronger then the other and would would gravitate to the stronger talents but that’s already how hunters worked with range survival.

[Worgar]

Mm and Sv were incredibly similar with the main difference being hard cast damage vs magic dot damage and Mobility, these differences can be made up for with talents in the new tree with out taking away thing away from MM as the with actual trees they can just add more nodes without sticking to the X rows of 3 choices design.

The only realistic downside would be that no matter how balanced it is one style will always be stronger then the other and would would gravitate to the stronger talents but that’s already how hunters worked with range survival.

The only hunter spec that struggled to have a decent representation outside of broken tuning was mm for all of wow's history until the legion rework of sv. Trying to stuff sv into the mm tree will, as has been pointed out already, just dilute the amount of choices mm and sv players would have in the tree. Based on the absolutely pathetic number of people who play msv when it doesn't have the most broken uncapped aoe in the game, it doesn't even deserve to take up 1/3rd of the hunter design space. Also the sv was basically mm argument doesn't hold up when literally every other pure dps spec prior to legion had similar amounts of ability overlap. And yet blizzard didn't decide to go through every pure dps class and arbitrarily change the role of one of the specs. (Yes melee dps and ranged dps are different roles in wow)

[Lorgar Aurelian]

The only hunter spec that struggled to have a decent representation outside of broken tuning was mm for all of wow's history until the legion rework of sv. Trying to stuff sv into the mm tree will, as has been pointed out already, just dilute the amount of choices mm and sv players would have in the tree. Based on the absolutely pathetic number of people who play msv when it doesn't have the most broken uncapped aoe in the game, it doesn't even deserve to take up 1/3rd of the hunter design space. Also the sv was basically mm argument doesn't hold up when literally every other pure dps spec prior to legion had similar amounts of ability overlap. And yet blizzard didn't decide to go through every pure dps class and arbitrarily change the role of one of the specs. (Yes melee dps and ranged dps are different roles in wow)

There is no reason it needs to delude any choice unless blizzard sticks all the talent trees to an arbitrary amount of nodes.

To use the classic trees as an example MM starts with a Stam boost and a increase to aspect of the hawk. The boost to hawk could stay as a boost o just normal aimed shot and Instead of having something useless like a stam boost they could just change the second starting choice to something along the lines of “aim shot does X less damage and can be used while moving. Gain black arrow. Your magic damage is increased by Y amount of damage taken from your Aimed shot”.

You would always be picking either the boost to Mm play style or the boost to Sv one with no wasted points or choices and the rest of the tree can be build so damage increases to one play style always applies to the other and the damage just changed from up front and physical to dot and magical.

[Worgar]

There is no reason it needs to delude any choice unless blizzard sticks all the talent trees to an arbitrary amount of nodes.

To use the classic trees as an example MM starts with a Stam boost and a increase to aspect of the hawk. The boost to hawk could stay as a boost o just normal aimed shot and Instead of having something useless like a stam boost they could just change the second starting choice to something along the lines of “aim shot does X less damage and can be used while moving. Gain black arrow. Your magic damage is increased by Y amount of damage taken from your Aimed shot”.

You would always be picking either the boost to Mm play style or the boost to Sv one with no wasted points or choices and the rest of the tree can be build so damage increases to one play style always applies to the other and the damage just changed from up front and physical to dot and magical.

putting the sv playstyle, which was distinct from mm, into the mm tree, just limits the amount of options both the rsv player and the mm player would have, there is literally no way to not have this happen if we're getting our power from the tree. Why should both rsv and mm take less playstyle options just so msv can continue to not be worth the design space it occupies?

[Lorgar Aurelian]

putting the sv playstyle, which was distinct from mm, into the mm tree, just limits the amount of options both the rsv player and the mm player would have, there is literally no way to not have this happen if we're getting our power from the tree. Why should both rsv and mm take less playstyle options just so msv can continue to not be worth the design space it occupies?

The “distinctness” of Sv was more or less two ability’s and some passives. Things like explosive arrow and L&L are already In Mm and are already useful, readding the one ability they are missing and re balancing the numbers is all that is needed to remake the play style and it can be done without limiting any thing from MM as talents can be made in a way to apply to both by just giving a starting option of talents that either makes Aimed shot stronger or makes it weaker but redistributes the damage to magic dots.

[Worgar]

The “distinctness” of Sv was more or less two ability’s and some passives. Things like explosive arrow and L&L are already In Mm and are already useful, readding the one ability they are missing and re balancing the numbers is all that is needed to remake the play style and it can be done without limiting any thing from MM as talents can be made in a way to apply to both by just giving a starting option of talents that either makes Aimed shot stronger or makes it weaker but redistributes the damage to magic dots.

Blizzard didn't rework aff or destro lock to melee arbitrarily in legion, the most similar class/spec situation to mm/rsv. They both had a rot/burst distinction between them. The melee rework for sv never needed to happen in the first place, as they were more then capable of changing the name/visual effects of some shots/abilities to make mm and rsv more visually distinct. The original dev quote for why they made sv melee in the first place never talked about gameplay overlap. It just talked about identity and thematic overlap, neither of which are solved well by handicapping the spec.

For every talent option in the tree there to make the old rsv playstlye exist in current mm, there must be a possible mm talent cut. The only universe where this doesn't occur is one where blizzard just can't be bothered to make a full talent tree for mm.

[Lorgar Aurelian]

For every talent option in the tree there to make the old rsv playstlye exist in current mm, there must be a possible mm talent cut. The only universe where this doesn't occur is one where blizzard just can't be bothered to make a full talent tree for mm.

no there doesn’t need to be any cuts as unlike the X roll of 3 system of the current talent tree they can just add more nodes without taking any away unless they arbitrarily limited the amount of nodes for what ever reason.

[bloodmoth13]

Ranged survival was utterly redundant thematically. I'd rather we got proper magic archer specs like dark ranger or potm or shadow hunter and have them tied to other classes.