Hope they leave Survival alone all expansion

[NutellaCrepe]

ITT:

People still complaining that SV is a melee spec.

If Blizz fixed MM and gave more azerite choices geared towards MM's serpent sting, etc, would people still be crying?

I always played a ranged hunter (mainly casual battleground pvp). With MM being sub par, BM getting a stream of nerfs, surv may be the way to go. I just have to re-farm some azerite gear i guess..

[Bepples]

Hunters used to have melee abilities in the beginning of the game, which were also emphasized by not letting them casting range spells, if the enemy was in close range. Even "deadzone" was a thing - - a certain range, where you could neither rangeattack, nor melee.

I know. I played then. I do not need some 3-post forum freshman lecturing me about Vanilla WoW.

And I don't care.

Melee for Hunters was an early naive "balancing mechanic" to account for Hunters having mostly instant casts while being ranged. It was a limitation, not a strength. And it certainly wasn't central to the Hunter identity.

Hunter page of the original WoW manual: https://i.imgur.com/pMCdBGz.png

Ranged weapons are first and foremost -- literally; they are right there in the opening sentence. The Hunter is a unique class in World of Warcraft because it is primarily a ranged attacker.

Than this was changed by removing the deadzone and the minimum rangecheck for most of the ranged abilities; effectively turning melee abilities like raptor strike/wing clip much less relevant and inferior to their ranged counterparts (i.e.: concussive shot).

All good changes. If they were going to define the class around ranged weapons they should never have had melee weapons. It was an utterly pointless and restricting mechanic.

Even the talents on the survival tree focused on melee abilities. So the survival being melee was grounded in the beginning, maybe the approach was different, as vanilla surv melee felt more like as being a "last resort to melee - if no choice left to fight and kite ranged", rather than purposefully being melee, as the current version of survival.

Only because the class was extremely rushed (it was the last class added and got minimal testing) and talent specialisations did not have nearly the same purpose/scope back then. You still had a ranged weapon and used ranged attacks. The only valuable talents in the SV tree were the control abilities. Blizzard realised pretty much immediately that a spec focusing on the key weakness of the class was a bad idea so they did away with it. I hope you are smart enough to understand that the spec crashing and burning for the few months of being melee-focused before being redone as a ranged-focused spec is not exactly a ringing endorsement for trying it out again (only this time without a ranged weapon at all) 12 years down the line.

Nevertheless, survival factually started as a spec having valid melee options, which options than were slowly stripped away from it, up to a point where it was actually completely homogenized by turning into another ranged spec for the hunter.. with slightly different options of focusing more on traps and poisons.

Oh, give me a break. Like I haven't heard this reductionist, revisionist nonsense a trillion times before from the melee fanatics.

Survival in Vanilla and BC had the exact same toolkit as the other two Hunter specs. That's how pure DPS classes worked back then. The talents you got were mostly CDs/passives. Lacerate did exist at the beginning but was a wasted talent point. The specs were never more homogenised than their Vanilla/BC iterations. From WotLK onwards they started getting their own unique abilities and they only diverged in theme and gameplay from there. The idea that they started different and started converging towards "homogenisation" is a revisionist myth and if you had any shame/honesty at all you would refrain from contributing to its spread.

Survival had a hell of a lot more than just "better traps".

In MoP they even removed our melee weapons. Did that not break the class identity too? Melee weapons were always a thing from the beginning for the hunters, hell there was even a very old meme about it "Every weapon is a hunter weapon".

No it didn't because as I demonstrated melee was not at all central to the identity. The original 2004 manual hardly even mentions it and that was the closest Survival ever was to actually being melee before Legion. I do not give the slightest shit about that meme and your use of it in a serious context here just further adds to my arguments since Legion that melee for SV has little more purpose than novelty meme material intended to cash in on inaccurate nostalgia.

Now it's the other way around for survival, being mostly melee spec with limited options to go ranged if the situation requires it. I am not saying the spec is perfect -- IMO it could have more ways to stay ranged with downsides of doing so. I like the idea behind of Aspect of the Eagle, but you can not really dynamically use it, due to the long cd. That is one thing I would change, like make it rather an aura, which you could toggle on and off, but going ranged would result in more of dps loss (if losing autoattack is not enough alone). That would encourage ppl to only use it, when there is no other options to stay melee, or kiting is heavily required.

I would also give survival hunters more way to stay safe when melee.. that part is lacking right now, especially in pve. We do have aspect of the turtle, but it's inferior to other melee defensive cooldowns, as it's a huge dps loss and should only be used if there's no other way to stay alive.

Melee is nothing more than a tacked-on weakness for the spec just like it ended up being in Vanilla. Only this time you're required to be melee for the sake of your auto attack and the token melee abilities that don't even fit with the rest of the identity (rather, the confused mess of competing themes they call an identity). The continued existence of melee-only mechanics in the spec is the single biggest, most prohibitive issue for SV. Any other issue people like you point to is merely deflection.

And last but not least.. from class fantasy point of view, using spears as hunter weapons suits the class just as much as using bows/guns. Just think about what weapons our ancestors used in pre-historic times to hunt down big games. It wasn't always aboutbeing only ranged.

Again, I don't care. Hunters in this game we are playing, World of Warcraft, were defined by their ranged weapons and the specs were established as ranged weapon specs. The only ones in the game, in fact. So we looked to them to explore ranged weapon archetypes. WoW does not need to start mutilating its classes to fit other RPGs and it ESPECIALLY doesn't need to start considering "realism" (what a ridiculous notion in a game that literally sends you dragons in the god-damned mail)

However, I do not agree with this assumption, that melee would be completely out of touch with the class, as I described it above. It wasn't originally.

It was, actually. But you can continue living in your own little (class) fantasy.

[Baredgrylls]

Hunter page of the original WoW manual: https://i.imgur.com/pMCdBGz.png

Ranged weapons are first and foremost -- literally; they are right there in the opening sentence. The Hunter is a unique class in World of Warcraft because it is primarily a ranged attacker.

In WOD hunters were ONLY ranged attackers.

Well survival is only one of the 3 specs and as survival only about half of our damage requires melee. That makes us 83% ranged so we all agree it is now primarily a ranged attacker. Great job blizzard for taking us back to our class roots!

FpicEail, you have lost this war. Blizzard does not want to change survival back to being only ranged. Most people who have played survival in BFA do not want it to go back to being only ranged. I’m sorry you don’t like it, but it may be time to let go. It doesn’t look like they are interested in what you are saying.

[godofdun]

I'm liking it more this time as well, much less helter skelter. You've still got plates to juggle, especially since the mongoose bite talent and wildfire infusion talent performing so well numbers wise but even if those get nerfed or falls out of favor there's still plenty going on. Also the things that ARE going on don't feel like they're competing with each other so much.

[Deleted]

After all these years, I must admit FpicEail's sea of salt has participated in my enjoyment of the Survival spec. He's been writing the same things, over and over, for two years now. What a great time to celebrate his uselessness.

[Deleted]

Oh my, what a saltmine.

[Bepples]

In WOD hunters were ONLY ranged attackers.

Yes. Well done. And that was a good thing. If the identity of Hunters was centered around ranged weapons, which it was, it is better to focus on that and not dilute the identity with needless melee restrictions.

Well survival is only one of the 3 specs and as survival only about half of our damage requires melee. That makes us 83% ranged so we all agree it is now primarily a ranged attacker. Great job blizzard for taking us back to our class roots!

Stupid argument. It doesn't matter if Survival is "mostly ranged". A) it doesn't use a ranged weapon (an animation that includes a ranged weapon for one their abilities is a stretch at best) and b) it still needs to stand in melee to do optimal DPS. Both were never true for any Hunter spec iteration before Legion and both weaken the class identity as well as the spec's own identity. Survival, historically, has been all about versatility and opportunism. Arbitrarily restricting itself to melee is the exact opposite of both those things.

FpicEail, you have lost this war. Blizzard does not want to change survival back to being only ranged. Most people who have played survival in BFA do not want it to go back to being only ranged. I’m sorry you don’t like it, but it may be time to let go. It doesn’t look like they are interested in what you are saying.

I've seen this demoralisation tactic time and time again and it, like the rest of them, doesn't work. You know why? Because we are in a post-Legion WoW where the purely melee Survival (Legion) doesn't exist anymore. That spec was such an unequivocal failure that they dropped it after just one expansion. And the changes they made were massive compromises towards ranged combat, so much so that there are only 2 melee abilities left; both token abilities that don't fit with the rest of them just so that they can still call it a melee spec. Also, people are treating its ranged mechanics as the selling point while downplaying the melee mechanics. Consciously or not, you people are treating the melee mechanics of Survival as a hindrance rather than a strength. Losing the war would be melee SV being validated as a successful spec on account of the melee mechanics and surviving into the 7th expansion as a similar version to the Legion one. That's not what happened. They compromised towards ranged far more than I ever anticipated. I call that winning.

Whether or not they're interested in what I'm saying in particular, they clearly are interested in the notion that Survival being melee-only in Legion caused a divide in the class and weakened the class as a whole, an argument I happened to have pushed many times throughout Legion, as they stated that as their primary motivator for the BfA rework which took out a whole bunch of melee mechanics in favour of ranged ones.

As for this:

Most people who have played survival in BFA do not want it to go back to being only ranged.

Baseless conjecture. In fact, it's more likely based on what we've seen in the representation statistics and Blizzard's own statements that the opposite is true: there are probably more people who either don't care about whether it's restricted to melee or actively prefer if it weren't than there are people who want it to remain strictly melee. A simple example is how the spec's representation went up when they removed most of the melee-only mechanics. At this point there's a correlation between how ranged the spec is and how many people are playing it.

What a great time to celebrate his uselessness.

I mean, we ensured that Legion SV didn't last more than one expansion, which is more than I hoped/bargained for during Legion. Pretty damn useful outcome to me.

[lokatii]

Lol at people saying bm is the easiest of the three specs. So bad.

[Deleted]

I've played hunter since the original beta. I like Survival as it is. I hope they leave it alone too.

[Regalosh]

I like survival too... leveled up as BM and also was BM in the beginning... but even before I specced to surv, I felt like hunter is not what it was anymore. Despite, how efficient BM can be, the gameplay itself feels lackluster and boring. Surv on the other hand has more depth compared to the other two spec.

What I like in surv currently:
- Latent Poison: it keeps you engaged during aoe pulls, as you have to keep a record of high stacks and harvest them in time. If you do so, the result feels really rewarding.
- Wildfire infusion: the different bonuses the three types of bombs gives has a big impact on your actual gameplay. It makes surv not as straightforward and streamlined as the other two specs, but mostly adapting to the new situation to make out of it the most.
- Moongose Fury: some say it's just braindead spamming, but since it's about building up that 5 stacks in 15 secs the fastest and as effective as possbile, I don't think that statement is true.
- Raptor Bite: good alternative if you don't like the mini-game of stacking Moongose Fury, slightly less damage, but since easier to play with RB, it might still result in better dps, due to less possible fuck-ups.

What I don't like:
- the survivability feels lackluster. Exhaustion is okay, turtle aspect is more about deflecting, but no dps while the buff is up, disengage with posthaste is really good, but loss of dps again if you don't have Aspect of the Eagle up.
- the utility of survival is good enough, stuns, traps, slows... but it needs something that legitimize it's place in melee. Something that gives a good reason for the class to go melee and sacrifice the "convenience" of being ranged.
- Latent should be baseline IMO, instead of being a trait. (and balancing around that of course)

p.s.: I feel sorry for those, who miss the old surv. I stopped playing WoW at the beginning of WoD and only recently returned. I was surpised too, how much the spec changed over the course of time. Didn't like it at first, to be honest.. but after giving it more and more try, I happened start liking this new way.

[NutellaCrepe]

*Wall of tears*

Surv melee spec is here to stay. Stop crying about it because it does not fit your own personal view of what a hunter should be. Melee survival hunter is a popular spec whether you like it or not.

[Bepples]

Surv melee spec is here to stay. Stop crying about it because it does not fit your own personal view of what a hunter should be. Melee survival hunter is a popular spec whether you like it or not.

It really isn't that popular (especially considering it's performance) and Blizzard's already made massive compromises towards ranged... you know... the part that saved it from being the most abandoned spec in the game. You're very overconfident, to say the least, if you think the melee mechanics are safe forever.

[Deleted]

This spec is damn near perfect. I love how fun it is to play.

Did you just say "fun to play" ?! Ion, do your duty.

[NutellaCrepe]

It really isn't that popular (especially considering it's performance) and Blizzard's already made massive compromises towards ranged... you know... the part that saved it from being the most abandoned spec in the game. You're very overconfident, to say the least, if you think the melee mechanics are safe forever.

It's out of your hands buddy. Get over it.

[Deleted]

Surv melee spec is here to stay. Stop crying about it because it does not fit your own personal view of what a hunter should be. Melee survival hunter is a popular spec whether you like it or not.

Tragically, Blizzard nerfs the other two specs into oblivion in order to force people to play that melee hunter abomination.
We don't mind survival being good, we mind how Blizzard removes the choice, and pidgeonholes all hunters into being melee for pvp.

[NutellaCrepe]

Tragically, Blizzard nerfs the other two specs into oblivion in order to force people to play that melee hunter abomination.
We don't mind survival being good, we mind how Blizzard removes the choice, and pidgeonholes all hunters into being melee for pvp.

That's a separate issue. He's spending hours upon hours writing posts about how semi melee surv hunter's don't fit his personal expectations of what it should be.

Balancing the 2 other ranged specs is something that needs to happen regardless.

[Malikath]

Tragically, Blizzard nerfs the other two specs into oblivion in order to force people to play that melee hunter abomination.
We don't mind survival being good, we mind how Blizzard removes the choice, and pidgeonholes all hunters into being melee for pvp.

welcome to the reality of being a pure DPS, even now you have no choice.

[Regalosh]

That's a separate issue. He's spending hours upon hours writing posts about how semi melee surv hunter's don't fit his personal expectations of what it should be.

Balancing the 2 other ranged specs is something that needs to happen regardless.

This.


Make the other two specs more fun to play, and/or viable and as the topic thread says: leave survival alone.

[Bepples]

It's out of your hands buddy. Get over it.

The corpse of Legion Survival says otherwise.

leave survival alone.

Ranged Survival wasn't left alone, so no I will not leave melee Survival alone.

[Doffen]

The corpse of Legion Survival says otherwise.



Ranged Survival wasn't left alone, so no I will not leave melee Survival alone.

You said earlier that you don't care. You do care, so so much.

You should try it out. Survival is so fun, probably the best version of Survival since it was the buffer-specc in TBC.