I just noticed how much better Classic hunter is

[NineSpine]

I played since 2005. Instances are central to classic WoW PvE. It's true that time spent levelling is a much bigger role in classic than it is in retail and I don't particularly mind that (although I think the old world is mostly terrible and has aged poorly; I prefer the Northrend style of things), but dungeons and raiding are crucial.

Dungeons and raiding are important. They aren't the entire focus of the design. Nobody is saying that having dungeons and raids, or any kind of instance, is an issue. The argument is that a game design hyper-focused on instances loses a significant amount of what makes a game an MMO.

The key to getting people out in the world is to have compelling rewards and incentives. Classic achieved that in some places, not in others. Retail does too.

Retail puts the vast majority of rewards and incentives inside instances.

This means the same thing.

Combat rotations are an important part of expressing the fantasy and identity of a class and spec. They actually count a hell of a lot more than the out of combat elements you obsess over.

I don't know how many times you are going to make me repeat it: I do no care about combat rotations. A warlock in Dragonflight does not feel like more of a warlock to me just because I have to pull off some clunky, obnoxious rotation while staring at a weakaura. Almost every spec I've played in retail in the last six years has felt like another interchangeable little bit of non-immersive nonsense, a stupid little reaction-time puzzle game that gets in the way of the game. A flow chart and a class fantasy are not the same thing to me.

Have you played Dark Souls? I love Dark Souls combat. When I have a fast weapon, I FEEL like I have a fast weapon. When I have a big heavy clunky weapon, I FEEL like I have a big heavy clunky weapon. If every weapon also had a bunch of button combos to pull off and procs to respond to, those immersive distinctions would go away. Instead, it would all be turned into a homogenized mini-game. Would that combat be more fun and enjoyable for some people? Absolutely, but it would remove the elements I actually care about.

Probably because people don't find travel particularly engaging? Like I said, I played since 2005. I remember people regularly refusing to group up if there wasn't a Warlock to summon. People have always been lazy and averse to travelling. I'm of the mindset that once you've seen an area once or twice establishing a shortcut is not only fine but ideal. This is stock-standard RPG design.

In any case people find mage portals and summoning very useful in retail.

No, that's stock-standard RPG design for YOU and games that YOU like. I don't like that. I don't want to fast travel everywhere all the time. It makes the world feel small and allows developers to get away with poor world design.

A great example is the ingenious layout of the world in Dark Souls 1, something From has not replicated since that game. Why? They don't have to, because fast travel negates the need to create a coherent world full of visual cues and pragmatic, realistic shortcuts. Even within Dark Souls 1, once you get fast travel the world and feel design falls off a cliff, because the need to design things in a coherent way is negated by the fast travel.

If their preference included pouring sand and pebbles into their food because they like the challenge or whatever, I would probably call them weird and wrong, yes.

That's what retail wow rotations feel like to me, pouring sand and pebbles into my food for a challenge.

No engagement was ever added to the Hunter class by having to stockpile ammo.

It does for me, just like Soul Shards make warlock more engaging to me.

Because they never implemented that. It shows they were less interested in the immersion and more implemented in the time/gold sink aspect.

It's like how weapon skills weren't reasonable and they went out of their way to ensure the system was as unreasonable as possible, even sacrificing immersion to do so e.g. not being able to level skills against dummies/low level targets, skills of similar weapons not being transferrable to a degree, etc.

If Retail implemented something like these it would be lambasted for being a transparent attempt to keep players hooked via grind. That was their purpose in classic WoW too, it's just people come up with romanticised excuses to dodge around this point because they can't come to terms with the fact that it was a commercialised product just like Retail.

I happen to know that the purpose of weapon skills was to make it so that by max level there would be some distinction between members of the same class, which would enhance the feeling of your character being unique. Since leveling a weapon skill was a pain in the ass, you were expected to stick to the ones you already had, and someone willing to go through the trouble of leveling all weapons would stand out as an rare exception.

Did this design work out well? Of course not, but we can see here that you are incapable of even conceiving of the nuance in something like this. You think it all just must be some bizarre, elaborate attempt to be bad on purpose, rather than what it is: A very cool idea that didn't work out as well as intended.

So why did WoW not implement them? There were plenty of people that insisted WoW did not count as a real MMO for not having them, just as you're insisting that retail WoW does not count as an MMO for not having things like ammo.

This is not exactly difficult to understand so you're playing dumb here is noted.

Where in the words "Massively Multiplayer Role Playing Game" do you find the words "permanent death penalty"? This is as stupid as saying that since all MMOs at one point had been fantasy, then a sci fi game can't be an MMO. It's just dumb on its face, and your conviction that it is very clever is kinda sad.

Retail does a pretty good job at compelling world content these days, you know. Maybe you would know a thing or two about that if you played it.

No, it doesn't. The world content is incredibly bland, homogenized, interchangeable, overly gamified nonsense. Looking at my map and seeing clusters of icons to go complete, which are going to reset and randomly turn on/off tomorrow, just so I can slowly fill up a bar to get a big shiny reward, is not interesting to me. It's checklist gaming, the lowest form of game design. It's a model taken from shitty, predatory mobile games. The idea that that is "compelling" is laughable.

Even dragon riding could have been cool, but what did they do? Turn it into shitty, gamified nonsense.

You know you've lost the plot when you're begrudging "gamifying" inside a literal video game.

Since I've actually, you know, been a video game designer, I don't really need a lesson on terminology from someone that clearly doesn't understand the terminology. Gamification is when you turn an element of the game into a game itself. Not all elements of games are gamified. You seem to think "gamified" and "game-like" mean the same thing. They don't, but next time maybe you can ask for clarification rather than embarrassing yourself with proud ignorance.

Why is sharing some things across an account bad? It's good to encourage people to experience the game in different ways rather than discouraging it.

It's not "bad". It's a design choice I don't prefer. I know these distinctions are hard for you to make because to you it is extremely important to be perceived as Objectively Right (due to the insecurity your posts all practically scream). Don't project your need for validation onto me.

The reason I don't like it is because it homogenizes the experience across characters, which actually disincentivizes me from experiencing the game different ways. Playing a different character is a new way to experience the game because it is different, not because I get to take all my shit from my other character with me.

Yeah you instead prefer turning up 5 mins late to every important lore event and being in charge of cleanup duty with generic kill/collect quests from level 1 to max. Some compelling role-playing right there.

I don't care about "important lore events". Not once in my entire life have I sat down with some friends who play an MMO and we talked about the "important lore event" we witnessed. We talk about what our characters did because of choices we made. We talk about the emergent experiences. That's the story I care about, not who Malygos yelled at in a cutscene.

I will remember until the day I die, and tell 1000 times, the story of how my first classic hardcore character died to a zhevra because I did something stupid. That's the story I care about. That's the type of story MMOs create and why they can be an amazing gaming space, not "lore events".

What exactly do you think the objective of a video game is?

That entirely depends on the game. The idea that Undertale, a very serious work of art, would have the same objective as Madden is absurd.

I like calling people wrong because it makes them melt down like this, tbqh.

At least you admit you are just a troll with no integrity.

You're trying to romanticise it, but what you're opposing here is compelling gameplay that expresses fantasy and identity.

Take Beast Mastery, for example. In retail WoW, it has a gameplay loop that heavily ties in to cooperation with the pet. The basics are you use Barbed Shot to bleed the target and send the pet into a frenzy, making it attack faster and giving a cooldown reduction to Bestial Wrath which is the dual Hunter-Pet enrage. There's also Multi-Shot which signals the pet to cleave. The fantasy and identity is intrinsically tied into the gameplay, so you actually feel like a beast master with distinct strengths and traits.

Contrast this with classic WoW. If you spec into Beast Mastery, almost every single bonus is passive assive from Bestial Wrath, which this time is on a fixed cooldown and only affects the pet, and Intimidation which is highly situational. You do the exact same Auto -> Aimed -> Auto -> Multi -> Auto -> Auto loop as any Marksmanship, Survival, or hybrid-specced Hunter. Your pet is no more than a passive DoT; just one that's marginally stronger than that of the other two specs. Zero interaction beyond Bestial Wrath, which itself doesn't ineract with anything else. And, of course, because of opaque internal mechanics, the spec is borderline useless in any group content because they neglected to make the pet actually benefit from the Hunter's gear.

The gameplay and "rotation" is not a separate matter you can discount entirely. It's critical to the sense of identity you harp on about, and classic WoW just doesn't achieve it.

There are plenty of improvements that can be made to classic. I'd love for Demonology, my favorite spec, to feel more pet-focused and not like a bunch of random utility buffs. Those improvements do not require replacing the gameplay with some obnoxious priority-based horsehsit that feels the same on every class. It's not why I'm playing the game. What you are describing is exactly as interesting as replacing the combat with an FPS. It's not what I'm here for. It's like showing up to a Chinese restaurant and being served pizza. I don't care if you like pizza better. It's not what I came here for.

[Bepples]

I super don't care, Warcraft isn't meaningfully different from other fantasy universes in a way that makes a melee hunter an unreasonable approach.

It is meaningfully different. WoW has playable classes that need central, focused identities with specialisations that build on them. That means that although Hunter is an extremely broad concept that can apply to just about anything, in WoW it needs a focused identity that's distinct from other classes. That's why they made Hunters the ranged weapon users. It is absolutely unreasonable to pursue a melee Hunter in this context, especially given the 12 years the entire class was ranged, the fact that we already had 3 valuable and distinct specs, melee Hunter being an unpopular concept, etc.

It may work well in other games to have a melee Hunter. It even works for non-playable Warcraft heroes. But to think that automatically translates to working well for the WoW Hunter class is bonkers. Especially considering this isn't hypothetical: they did it, and it hasn't worked well. It's the game's most controversial and least played spec rework, even years afterwards.

1. Survival hunter doesn't necessarily need MAGIC to function in melee, what it needs is tools and they could be any number of things, among its tools are harpoons, grenades laced with all manner of different things, their animal companion, a hand crossbow, chakrams, bolas, and so on and so forth.

Oh, so it doesn't represent the most iconic and unique part of Geralt. Got it.

This is just "Survival's identity is having no identity", btw. One would think that if it were a resourceful spec it wouldn't arbitrarily ignore the most unique and significant resource of the Hunter class: the ranged weapon.

2. The survival hunter DOES have magic to aid it such as the different aspects, cheetah to close the gap between an enemy, turtle to protect itself from, say, a dragon's breath, in place of mutagens and magic the survival hunter also has a pet and with coordinated assault both act as one.

I think you knew how much of a reach this was before you typed it.

They make for perfect comparisons, they are fantasy universes similar enough to WoW that feature people whom fight in melee and are hunters.

It's like when people fight with swords in movies and they do a funny little spin, they'd be dead on the spot if they tried to pull that off in a real fight but within the logic of the film it's a viable move.

Realism wasn't the contention. In any case it's irrelevant; being ranged is a meaningful advantage even in the fantasy world, and Survival arbitrarily abandons that advantage just to be a special snowflake. This is why it's viewed as a handicapped spec. Because it is.

You're trying to abstract away WoW's class framework. That doesn't work. There's also such a thing as a melee mage in some fantasy universes, but that doesn't mean it's something that fits well with WoW's class framework.

P.S. Can you work on your repeated incorrect usage of the word "whom"? It's not just a smarter-sounding version of "who".

Exactly, you can pick whatever weapon you'd like to fight with but no matter which you pick you're still a monster hunter because being a hunter isn't tied to what distance you engage your enemies at or what weapons you use.

It's about what you do, not what you wield.

I did all the Nesingwary quests on my Paladin including Big Game Hunter. Therefore my paladin is a Hunter.

Gibberish argument.

But it DOES make sense to portray SOME of the fighting styles in the game and other fantasy universes as something WoW hunters can and should be emulating.

Not when the central identity of the class is established as a ranged weapon user.

You know WoW isn't even the only RPG to do this. Assassin's Creed: Odyssey comes to mind. The "Hunter" talents of that game are all ranged weapon buffs. Including venomous and incendiary ammunition.

You seem to be incapable of grasping that being a melee Hunter is inherently disadvantaged compared to being a ranged Hunter. It's better to be able to attack at 40 yards than to be unable. So when you create a Hunter and you start as a fully capable 40 yard range weapon user, and then you lose that capability when you spec into Survival, that makes no sense. It might be some people's thematic preference, but it's clearly an extremely niche one. So melee Hunters really do make zero sense given WoW's class and spec system, and WoW's established Hunter class identity.

I'm not gonna advocate for hunters getting a hunting horn just because Monster Hunter lets players use a hunting horn, but what I am going to advocate for is SOME kind of melee hunter spec which survival is.

I'll be honest I don't really know what you're schizoposting about here, I'd like to think I'm pretty well versed in the English language but this is a mess of a paragraph.

I showed this paragraph to multiple people and none of them had trouble understanding it. It sounds like a you problem. Here's the same argument in dot points to help you figure it out:

- WoW has classes with central identities, and each has 3 specs that build on its core identity
- WoW already had plenty of melee classes, especially physical-focused melee (Warriors, Rogues)
- To make Hunters unique both visually and mechanically, they made ranged weapons the core part of the Hunter class
- They started off with a minimum range limitation, but they later removed this
- Pragmatically, melee Hunter gives us nothing. We can already fight at full strength in melee.
- In terms of player sentiment, hardly anyone wanted it. Most Hunters want to play ranged, most melee already have a main class they prefer.

Given all these factors, melee Hunter makes zero sense.

Monster Hunter being classless merely demonstrates just how versatile fantasy hunters can be, thus it makes sense that a dedicated hunter spec in WoW would feature MORE of what they CAN be (melee AND ranged) rather than SOME of what they can be (exclusively ranged).

Monster Hunter is a classless system that is utterly incomparable to WoW. A WoW equivalent would be taking Warriors, giving them more specs to represent each weapon type including ranged weapons, and representing all bombs, poisons etc via profession consumables instead of integral parts of the class.

Rogues and warriors may hunt monsters from time to time but that is never their primary function, hunters hunt monsters, and melee hunters weren't represented in WoW until we had a melee hunter spec.

We all fight the same things in WoW, so this is just meaningless semantic drivel.

Popularity has nothing to do with whether a spec makes sense.

It's unpopularity can be due to a NUMBER of different things wholly irrelevant to the concept of the spec.

For instance people might be inherently slow to embrace new ideas, the bulk of the playerbase might prefer other specs not because survival is bad but because the other specs are disproportionally good, the way it plays might not be to the taste of a lot of players and so on and so forth.

Are you really going there? Are you actually going to pretend that it's because of reasons other than being melee?

It's clearly not because people are slow to embrace new ideas because it's been in the game for 7 years. What a ridiculous thing to say.

It's probably not because of tuning because SV is unpopular even when its damage is fine. Right now it does more than MM, and MM is considered very bad in M+ from both a damage and playstyle perspective, yet there are more MM players.

You are right that it's because it doesn't align with the taste of players; you're just in denial that the core reason for that is because hardly anyone is interested in a melee Hunter because it's ultimately just a worse Hunter.

Melee hunters exist both in WoW and countless other fantasy universes, and as I've said WoW isn't meaningfully different to the point that the idea is wholly unviable.

Uhhh no that's not necessarily why it doesn't work, that's your speculation and conjecture.

Hunters aren't what you'd like them to be anymore, there is no "otherwise has ranged weapon combat as the core pillar of their class), the defacto core pillar of the class, of any class, is class fantasy which can feature different takes on what it is.

I mean people can live in denial and pretend that the core of the class is something else, but it's not really a subjective matter. Ranged DPS are utterly essential to the aesthetic, theme, and playstyle for the class. Most Hunter portrayals heavily focus on them and classwide mechanics revolve around them (that's why they had to add the animation-only crossbow to melee SV).

A good microcosm of this is finding pre-Legion Hunter class interactions. The class call from Nefarian, for example, broke the Hunter's ranged weapon. The class epic book in Ashran buffs our ability range when on the towers. Both times the class got a legendary it was a bow (hilariously the 2nd time was after SV was melee, so it missed out). Imagery for the class always includes ranged weapons or ammunition, including the class icon itself.

Whenever anything to do with Hunters is portrayed or designed, it involves ranged weapons. Even after SV went melee. That's why it will always be the odd-one-out. It fundamentally works against the core class identity as a ranged weapon user.

Yeah I'm actually so biased that I'm unwilling to admit that I think assassination (poisons) and subtlety (ninja) could easily be merged and become poison-ninja to make room for a ranged rogue spec.

Never mind the fact these are mostly all bad ideas, you only started suggesting ranged specs after I pointed out how everything you suggested was melee this and melee that. Needless to say I'm not buying your sincerity here.

- - - Updated - - -

No, that's stock-standard RPG design for YOU and games that YOU like. I don't like that. I don't want to fast travel everywhere all the time. It makes the world feel small and allows developers to get away with poor world design.

A great example is the ingenious layout of the world in Dark Souls 1, something From has not replicated since that game. Why? They don't have to, because fast travel negates the need to create a coherent world full of visual cues and pragmatic, realistic shortcuts. Even within Dark Souls 1, once you get fast travel the world and feel design falls off a cliff, because the need to design things in a coherent way is negated by the fast travel.

Obviously there's not much point responding to your posts since you landed yourself a 3-month ban. However I wanted to single out this part for the thread.

Being against fast travel in RPGs is one of the most major and timeless red flags of someone who's totally out of touch and delusional about what derives meaning and enjoyment in a game.

There's no dispute that there needs to be a well-designed world and ideally it should be coherent, but fast travel is not an impediment to that. A game with shit level design might excessively depend on that, but it's unlikely to be in and of itself the cause of that shit level design. Almost every single game implements fast travel because it's common sense. It's delusional to think that people will derive the same level of enjoyment and immersion during their 10th time travelling to a place v.s. the 1st time, so it makes sense to provide fast travel after the 1st time travelling to a place which is basically how it works in every game. Even classic WoW had it in the form of portals, and a compromised fast travel in the form of flight paths.

I haven't played Dark Souls 1, but I have played Dark Souls 3 and Elden Ring and I found them to have very good world design. I have zero reason to believe you aren't just bullshitting as much about Dark Souls 1 as you are about everything else. I did ask someone I know who's a huge Dark Souls fan and he disagrees with your take FWIW.

Since I've actually, you know, been a video game designer

Cool story, I don't buy it. Especially since you have a hilariously over-romanticised view of how people approached Classic and you seem to think everyone just frolicked through the meadows enjoying it for what it is with no focus on competitive aspects and "gamified" incentives.

[NineSpine]

Obviously there's not much point responding to your posts since you landed yourself a 3-month ban. However I wanted to single out this part for the thread.

Being against fast travel in RPGs is one of the most major and timeless red flags of someone who's totally out of touch and delusional about what derives meaning and enjoyment in a game.

I'm not "against" fast travel. I just don't prefer it.

I don't know why it is so important to you to tell me what I am supposed to derive meaning and enjoyment out of. I don't give a shit if you enjoy fast travel. I don't, and I don't have to. Different people have different preferences. Grow up.

There's no dispute that there needs to be a well-designed world and ideally it should be coherent, but fast travel is not an impediment to that. A game with shit level design might excessively depend on that, but it's unlikely to be in and of itself the cause of that shit level design. Almost every single game implements fast travel because it's common sense. It's delusional to think that people will derive the same level of enjoyment and immersion during their 10th time travelling to a place v.s. the 1st time, so it makes sense to provide fast travel after the 1st time travelling to a place which is basically how it works in every game. Even classic WoW had it in the form of portals, and a compromised fast travel in the form of flight paths.

Flight paths are not fast travel, and some classes having teleportation abilities is not what we are talking about.

Fast travel inarguably makes game worlds feel smaller. It inarguably reduces the value of putting resources into the spaces between points of interest. None of this means you have to dislike fast travel. You don't have to value the world feeling larger or developers putting more resources into the world between points of interest, but you don't get to pretend these tradeoffs don't exist just because you don't care. They are still tradeoffs because, and I know this concept is extremely difficult for you, other people like different things than you do.

I haven't played Dark Souls 1, but I have played Dark Souls 3 and Elden Ring and I found them to have very good world design. I have zero reason to believe you aren't just bullshitting as much about Dark Souls 1 as you are about everything else. I did ask someone I know who's a huge Dark Souls fan and he disagrees with your take FWIW.

I certainly can't argue with "I didn't play it, but my friend disagrees with you".

Cool story, I don't buy it. Especially since you have a hilariously over-romanticised view of how people approached Classic and you seem to think everyone just frolicked through the meadows enjoying it for what it is with no focus on competitive aspects and "gamified" incentives.

I've been playing classic for years, and that's how I play it as well as how my friends play it. You aren't going to prove my current lived reality wrong. The problem here is that I describe what I enjoy and I fully recognize other players enjoy other things. You bizarrely want to pretend that players with different preferences than yourself don't exist, right to their face, as they tell you what they prefer. It's an extremely strange and immature way to behave. It's like someone telling you they prefer blues music and then you insist they must be objectively wrong somehow because you prefer rap music. It wreaks of insecurity.

[stellabarnes]

I agree, there's a unique charm to the Classic experience, especially for Hunters. The focus on close combat and the automatic quiver equip when using a bow added depth to the class. These elements made the gameplay more immersive and enhanced the class identity. While retail WoW has evolved in many ways to accommodate different playstyles, it's always interesting to reflect on the aspects of Classic that made the game special.

[Cynical Asshole]

I actually quit WoW some days ago.

The only thing I truly enjoy in WoW is MM and BM hunter in solo casual PVP such as warmode, 1v1 and bgs, and M+ in between them. In DF hunter is pure garbage at solo casual PVP.

Squishy and lacking serious tools to kite melee classes. A melee can just eat every trap and every cc, and still kill you because it's way more durable than you and it only needs 3 seconds of uptime in order to destroy you, and some melee can even kill you from range, like ret paladins and unholy dks, and rogues...well rogues just mash that Shadowstep button to completely counter any kiting attempt you might engage in.

Nope. I'm done with this shit. I'll come back if Blizzard does a hunter revamp and also does away with some of that ridiculous button bloat on MM as well. I guess I'll finally finish BG3 now.