Something interesting I've taken note of since playing through Vanilla is that they've kinda actually been bastardizing the class since the very beginning.
Not sure if you played Vanilla Hunter, but, as boring as it was, I felt like it not only encapsulated the fantasy of being a marksman (standing perfectly still waiting for that perfect shot to align) but it also was the only ranged DPS spec that had a completely different playstyle to other ranged. Like not only was it based on physical damage, but it didn't have a filler spell. You had a lot of downtime and basically timed your entire rotation around not clipping your auto shots.
I'm not saying that's the "correct" way that the class should have been played, but basically ever since Vanilla they have been changing things to make hunter into just another caster class. TBC introduced Steady Shot which essentially just made them physical damage casters with filler spells and all.
Personally, I think Hunters need an entire rework for all of their specs, and they probably need 4 specs in total in order to tick all of the major boxes that people enjoy with Hunter.
Ranged DPS spec that focuses around controlling your pet as your source of damage.
Ranged DPS spec that is petless? Or not petless? but the damage comes from your physical DPS abilities. I would like to see more of an emphasis on timing somehow, but I'm not a game dev. I'd like MM to encapsulate more of that Vanilla style feeling of waiting for that perfect moment to take the shot without being as boring.
A Melee DPS spec that fights tooth and claw with your pet as a team but with plenty of tricks like various traps and grenades.
A ranged DPS spec that fights more with magic than with actual marksmanship.
I feel like Hunters were probably the class that felt the most designed for a Vanilla WoW experience what with their tons of utility spells that hardly saw any use in end game content. They really felt like a true Hunter style class. You could basically be the survival man out in the wilderness tracking prey and living off the land. It was a lot of fun leveling through Vanilla with a Hunter. Bring back the flavor.
I'd love a magic bow spec and all but like, vanilla hunter was terrible. Sitting there auto attacking while doing 50% the damage of a warrior
Marks is awesome now. Yeah it's slow with longer casts, but imo that fits the sniper vibe and there aren't many specs like it anymore.
Hey, I didn't say that Vanilla hunter was either good or fun, but I do think it was the best design from the perspective of flavor and feeling.
Instead of doubling down and trying to find a way to make that sort of playstyle work while also being good on the damage meters and actually interesting to play as, they just said "Fuck it" and added Steady Shot to make it just another caster class.
I haven't played Hunter since Legion, so I don't really know how they've altered it since. I just know it always felt a little spammy ever since TBC. I can take a look at the class now.
Modern marks isn't spammy at all, it's one of the lower APM classes.
The set is part of this, since (at least in AE) you are basically just rotating multishots and Aimed Shots for insane trick shot damage.
It's a 2.5 sec cast base and does almost all your damage, it's completely different than BM or SV. It has a kind of "baseball" feeling where you are standing there waiting for the next pitch.
No they didn't. I already demonstrated that above when I listed their shot rotations. The only difference was MM had to fire off its focus generator, Steady Shot, twice to get a buff.
my point with the comment about BM is that survival borrows tons from BM, replace raptor strike with cobra shot and carve with multishot, and you pretty much have a BM.
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.I never said that people should cater to me or similar, dont know where you got that idea from.
Because we're in the tail end of an expansion and an entire class overhaul is on the horizon. Blizzard follows Semantic Versioning with its patches. Hence why Patch 6.1 back in WoD was correctly labelled as Patch 6.1 and not Patch 6.0.x even though there was no new raid as had been the standard up until then.Yea BM got buffed but blizzard really didnt solve the issue BM has (a flat dmg buff wont help them much sadly).
The kind of overhaul BM needs to be "fixed" will have to wait until Patch 10.0, the next major version (x.0).
When Patch 3.0 went live, the talent trees were the same style as they had been since Vanilla with some new abilities and another 10 points added to the pool once you reached maximum level. BM Hunters were putting only 40 points into that tree, skipping the 41 point talent which was the ability to tame/use exotic pets like Spirit Beasts. Instead they would take the 21 point talent in the MM tree, Readiness, which reset all your cooldowns. This way Hunters could have Bestial Wrath twice every two minutes or so. Then Patch 3.0.8 gets deployed and Bestial Wrath was specifically removed from Readiness's effect along with other nerfs.As for Wrath BM hunter, i didnt play BM during wrath so dont know what you are refering to there.
Two specs are not melee so they have those to choose from. It's the same principal as people who play Death Knight, Demon Hunter, Druid, Monk, Paladin, and Warrior who don't like tanking. They have other specs they can play. DH only has 1 other spec to choose from and, if they don't want to heal too, Monk and Paladin only offer 1 spec too.well, many people didnt come to the hunter class to play meele, but like i explained before, if meele was a talent option or a 4th specc, i think that would have spared everyone of all the salt and frustration over the specc. i dont oppose a meele specc at all, my problem with was that we got a specc taken away in favor for it.
You just argued to keep Surv melee. It's been that way for a while now and there are people who seem to like it. Take it away and they have no alternative. Keep it Melee and folks like you have alternatives in BM and MM.A priest only have shadow specc, that is true, but i mean imagine if they took away holy and replace that with a dps specc, i think that would upset alot of priest players.
Wrath was actually the start of the decline for Survival IMO. It really shined in Burning Crusade with Expose Weakness. In a raid group, the hunter with the highest Agility would be Survival with all others being MM or BM. When the Surv hunter landed a crit, the entire raid got a buff of Attack Power that was equal to 25% of the hunter's Agility. So if you were that hunter and your Agi was 2000, the raid would get 500 AP. So this benefited Feral Druids, All Hunters, All Rogues, Ret/Prot(?) Paladins, and Arms/Fury/Prot(?) Warriors). With crit being what it was at the time, the buff had virtually 100% uptime once the first crit landed.So to conclude: the biggest issue with survival isnt that it has a meele option, the issue lies in that a specc got litterly taken away and replaced completly. That is why im playing hunter in classic right now beacuse when wrath hits, i can play ranged survival again.
But they didn't take away" ranged Surv if you reeally look at it since we've established that Surv and MM were basically the same spec with slightly different rotations and Surv was magic damage more than MM's physical. 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. They can even tell you what you said in your guild chat going back at least six months ago (this was demonstrated to hilarious effect in the Customer Service forums during Burning Crusade). So they know how many people are playing what class/spec for a majority of the time.
Do they draw the wrong conclusions from that data on occasion? Sure they do. 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.
Plus they probably wanted another class besides Druid that can go between Melee and Ranged and since Survival was MM w/ Magic Damage and was the least played spec, it was the logical one to change. And before you try using Druid as a precedent for a 4th spec, Druid was an exception that dated back to the Vanilla talent trees where one configuration was for tanking and another was for DPS, but both were called Feral. Blizzard just formalized the Feral Tanking spec as "Guardian" when MoP was released.
I rolled BM for the first time since Wrath because of the Legion revamp of MM tbh. It was allright in Legion because you had the marked shot window to time your aimed shots into (and it felt really good to have the tomb of sargeras tier set letting skilled players get a third aimed shot in for big boi damage in those windows)
But then BfA came and introduced shit like Rapid Fire and the god awful CD that is Trueshot Aura as it is right now. Neither Rapid Fire nor the "slap out a bazillion aimed shots and rapid fires!" design of Trueshot goes for the slow, careful marksman style and I feel myself trapped more and more into playing BM which is a very boring rotation for a 2004 hunter main that likes buttons.
I love Survival for pvp but dislike that it yoinked ranged surv. It should have taken BM imo it just fits better and would leave them with two ranged specs focused on your ranged attacks that they could make unique instead of MM getting cramped with all of it.
- - - Updated - - -
One pointer on the WoD comment is that iirc surv was the go-to pvp spec. I know I at least played it and it played very differently from MM (mainly because you didn't have instant AiS in pvp) as more of a kiting dot class. Was really fun and I do miss it, rip Frozen Ammo
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.
All I ever wanted was the truth. Remember those words as you read the ones that follow. I never set out to topple my father's kingdom of lies from a sense of misplaced pride. I never wanted to bleed the species to its marrow, reaving half the galaxy clean of human life in this bitter crusade. I never desired any of this, though I know the reasons for which it must be done. But all I ever wanted was the truth.
Only issue if they put RSV back in I'd prob sub again for retail (might for Classic LK) never liked MM (guess it felt the same if you just rolled your face across the keyboard) but I tried MM some and the end of WOD (quit just before Legion) and then again later a friend pulled me in for a bit in BFA and I just didn't like MM and unsubbed again.
Last edited by Dadwen; 2022-05-20 at 06:43 PM.
Rapid fire is awesome lol. Full mobility channel!
Maybe it's from playing a lot of swtor but it's great. Honestly kind of annoying how low prio it is with the set.
I'm in the same boat as you, I've literally just rolled BM as I hate the direction MM has gone in since Legion although Legion's ver of MM was not a bad spec I just absolutely hate Rapid fire with a passion.
- - - Updated - - -
Kind of disingenuous phrase it like that because MM has declined for being an interesting spec since Legion and if you've played a Hunter since classic like I have the changes have as someone said just bastardized our class to an almost depressing level, I've honestly thought about quitting in the past waswell because MM is no longer as fun as it used to be and I dont have an interest in other classes...
i feel like there is no melee hunter fantasy atm just throwing bombs, there's like 1 single target melee button and 1 aoe melee button and nothing else. it's just abunch of random ranged abilities thrown together. the 4p that makes them broken atm is just 2 ranged skills proccing eachother also idk man.
not sure how I'm dragging anyone down? just saying if someone though that MM played like RSV they are a moron, just a fact I played RSV from LK - WOD and leveled a MM from scratch and it's plays a lot different than MM (and still pissed at blizzard for deleting it in the first place for a spec they have to bribe with broken powers to play, is it past the 2nd least played spec yet?) and here to see how badly blizzard new dev's will screw up Classic LK they can't keep from messing anything up they get their hands on.
Wrath is a bad example to use due to it built on the old talent system still. If you take a look at MoP, survival was quite different from what MM was (and it didnt have access to MM talents for example). As for my 2nd point i think you misunderstood me, granted i havent showed any sources but if you take a look at logs and amount of players per spec since legion up until recent patch, survival been sitting on around 4-5% population of the hunter class. Its been severely underplayed and blizzard have even admitted that they knew the new survival would be a niche specc. Only reason why we see a rise now is beacuse they got a ridicously op tier set and double leggo, coupled with uncapped AoE so thats why you see more of them this patch.
Im not sure what you meant with "gut mm specc to get the magic mm back", what happened with MM when survival got reworked was that survival talents (SS and explosive shot for example) got showed into the MM tree, which kinda messed it up for the specc.
Yea its a shame that we have to wait so long for overhauls tbh but it is what it is.
ah i see, i can seee why they nerfed the talents in that sense then.
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.
Besides, what if i dont want to play MM or BM? actually, i am in that spot currently thats why i stopped playing my hunter since i hate how MM is currently and BM i never found fun really. Sure i have tried survival but in the end of the day if i wanted to play meele id go with a warrior or rogue. So this turns into that i have to reroll something else (which is priest currently). However if blizzard had made a talent that lets you either be meele or ranged for surv, i would play my hunter still.
That is true and thats why i hope blizzard tries to find a middle ground in all of this, just a talent to switch between meele and ranged could go a long way to help elevate the controversity around survival in general. Also to clarify, i dont want current meele surv to be removed, all i want is a option to play it ranged, thats all i ask for really.
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.
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.