You seriously believe MM was the best spec for the entirety of the games history? I’ll have what you’re smoking
Was every single element of both specs entirely different from one another back then? No.
But they, as specs, were unique enough for the time being. By the standards set at the time, they were in a good place.
As for RSV in itself, was it perfect design wise? No. In WoD, it lacked certain elements which allowed for some situational choices to be made. Such as a major CD, and more.
But nothing stopped them(devs) from correcting these issues going into Legion. Same with the topic of the general theme/mechanical diversity of the spec in general. If by Legion-standards, MM and RSV weren’t different enough then that would’ve solved itself due to what they did to all specs going into that expansion.
What the heck are you talking about here?
Survival in Vanilla wasn’t designed for you to be fighting in melee.
First off, we had no defined specializations back then at all. All we had was talent categories that held talent compilations divided by what main features of the class you wanted to improve.
Beast Mastery talents back then focused on pretty much everything involving your pets.
Marksmanship talents focused on everything involving the improvement of your ranged capabilities, abilities, and the use of the weapon.
Survival was mostly about improving your survivability through certain defensives and utility. That included the addition of some situational melee-abilities as, in parts of the game, you generally had a harder time trying to stay away from enemies. PvP is one example.
Secondly, no matter what talents you chose back then, no matter the talent category(BM/MM/SV) you had a set core of abilities which were always there to be used. No matter how many SV talents you picked, you were still a Hunter wanting to stay away from enemies, using a ranged weapon.
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Survival got overhauled in patch 1.7
I cannot say outside of the Talent Trees up until 1.11 -> 1.12 when Lacerate was changed to Wyvern Sting so thank you for letting me know whent the exact shift occured!
Just google wow talent calculator 1.1
I literally went and googled release/pre-patch 1.12 talent calculator lmao, but yeah will do in the future.
The major issue is a select few.
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blizzard refuse to balance survival in its current iteration as they know majority of hunters don’t enjoy the specc.
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blizzard decided to listen to voices against the concept of legion survival instead of the population that loved the new iterations.
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blizzard went crazy with the pruning, wasn’t it something like 13 abilities they removed from the legion iteration.
The fact of the matter is the class is one specc down permanently. They won’t ever hold survival as the meta for any worthwhile length of time. Because they know the majority won’t play it.
Is there much point holding a specc open which we know is basically going to remain bottom tier dps for the majority of its life span.
I wouldn’t be surprised if we see survival reverted to ranged in all honesty.
Fans of melee hunter would perform 100x stronger with any other melee class, even if they could only play that class to a 60 percentile… it’s held down by the fact they know there would be uproar if they forced the specc onto competitive players.
And no survival wasn’t designed to be melee originally. It did improve melee ability and things, but back then the class philosophy was very different and was built in a more customisable fashion
It was a tree which offered melee options not melee gameplay u could force it into a melee specc sure but back then you could push lots of classes in weird directions.
It did indeed.
Prior to 1.7 it was Outdoorsmanship and looked like the following(quote from an old post of mine):
Entrapment
Rank 5/5
Gives your Immolation Trap, Frost Trap, and Explosive Trap a 25% chance to entrap the target, preventing them from moving for 5 sec.Savage Strikes
Rank 5/5
Increases your critical strike chance with melee weapons by 5%.Precision
Rank 5/5
Increases your chance to hit with melee weapons by 5%.Improved Raptor Strike
Rank 5/5
Reduces the cooldown of your Raptor Strike by 1 sec.Improved Wing Clip
Rank 5/5
Gives your Wing Clip ability a 20% chance to immobilize the target for 5 sec.Lightning Reflexes
Rank 3/3
Increases your Dodge chance by 3%.Melee Specialization
Rank 5/5
Increases the damage you deal with melee weapons by 5%.Improved Freezing Trap
Rank 3/3
Increases the duration of your Freezing Trap by 6 sec.Improved Explosive Trap
Rank 2/2
Increases the initial damage done by your Explosive Trap by 60%.Improved Frost Trap
Rank 2/2
Increases the duration of your Frost Trap’s movement slowing effect by 3 sec.Improved Immolation Trap
Rank 5/5
Increases the damage done by your Immolation Trap by 15%.Deflection
Rank 5/5
Increases your Parry chance by 5%.Improved Mongoose Bite
Rank 5/5
Increases the damage done by your Mongoose Bite ability by 20%.Deterrence
Rank 1/1
Instant 5 min cooldown
When activated, increases your Dodge and Parry chance by 25% for 10 sec.Counterattack
Rank 1/1
45 Mana
Instant cast 5 sec cooldown
5 yd range
A strike that becomes active after parrying an opponent’s attack. This attack deals 40 damage and immobilizes the target for 5 sec. Counterattack cannot be blocked, dodged, or parried.Lacerate
Rank 1/1
65 Mana
Instant cast
5 yd range
Requires Melee Weapon
Wounds the target causing them to bleed for 77 damage over 21 sec.
Quite a few of these talents were focused on improving your capability to deal with melee-combat/situations. Both through increased damage output as well as better CC/traps and more. Not to mention defensive improvements such as Deterrence.
But, even if you were to go all the way down to Lacerate in this talent category(which in itself was completely horrendous in terms of damage), it still wouldn’t take away the fact that your baseline toolkit and abilities we’re nearly all of them, ranged abilities that relied on the use of a ranged weapon.
Even if you were to fully embrace this talent category, the design itself did not allow for melee combat to be more beneficial than the baseline ranged combat. Not even close.
The actual Survival spec which came after this, did little to change this fact.
It’s worth noting that the basic core toolkit we had back then, in combination with any active abilities we could get through talent options(combining all categories, not just SV talents), as well as many passive talents, combine all that, and you would essentially have the equivalent of the class today, with 1 spec chosen.
The other 2 specs we have now, are additional playstyle options which we did not have back then.
Sure, you had more choices back then in terms of raw talent picks. But so many of them, they did not really do anything for you. You barely noticed that you had them picked.
I know that I ain’t trying to say the system was better or worse then our current one.
What I mean is, it’s harder to really say “well this specc was melee” and u didn’t really complete trees back then your kinda took what you needed most from all 3 and pieced em together.
So I feel trying to label a hunter on the older designs into one specc isn’t really justified. No one took survival to become a melee centric build. It was used because back then hunters had more need for a level of melee capability.
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balance what? it’s in a decent spot.
blizzard usually does not even listen to any population because it doesn’t know what it is talking about (just look at the ideas “to make sv viable” our dear thread author had…)
Agreed. Pruning is bad
That’s an asspull and you know it
Still higher in dps rankings than our ONLY dps spec…
It was made with a hybrid in mind.
Why do you turn your opinion into a statement of truth…
I played my first hunter in Vanilla, and loved the melee aspect, allways missed it ever since till they finally gave survival a purpose.
Who are you to make these demands?
Melee elements are not the same as melee spec. But I am fine with hunter being melee, just make it a competitive melee, otherwise give back ranged.
Also, vanilla hunter was NEVER about melee. Your little dwarven head can’t seem to understand that survival was about SURVIVAL back then. Not about melee. You had a minimum range back then. So that meant as survival you a better toolkit while underfire in a place you were not really meant to survive in, but because you were SURVIVAL, having those options increased your SURVIVAL.
People on these forums can sometimes be really dense, trying to make points that don’t exist, just to carry their retarded arguments. I’m sick of it.
Think that name only lasted up to launch.
The name itself, I don’t actually remember the exact time when they changed it.
Patch 1.1 US launch:
Outdoorsmanship skill line renamed Survival.
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Doesn’t matter what it was called. What matters are the talents, and the talents suggest that outdoormanship was going for more option while out of minimum range and more survival, until you get in range.
We need to stop this “Survival was always meant to be melee”, because it wasn’t.
Wow logs shows it in a very different spot to where u claim. It’s the very bottom of the totem pole.
And throughout the majority of legion it was also almost at the bottom again.
I ain’t saying you can’t do content with it. you can effectively do any content with any specc, but that doesn’t mean it’s in a good spot.
What I’m saying is your more likely to be rejected because your a survival hunter then say a BM hunter.
At the end of the day there is always one specc which will perform better then the rest. And that is very rarely survival.
Hence why I play BM, why would I intentionally play my class in a way it hinders it’s dps.
I get the argument when it comes to swapping classes, because FoTM rerolling is a very different thing, when it comes to speccs, it’s ideal to take your strongest options into said content.
in popularity yes.
h ttps://www. warcraftlogs. com/zone/statistics/23#metric=dps&dataset=95&class=DPS
sv is above ret 
Survival talent tree up to patch 1.7 was very melee heavy oriented.
Could be combined with both BM or MM to achiev different playstyles.
…No it’s not?
It’s good single target, not great on cleave, pretty much the same as the rest of the expansion.
But even with the WCL statistics, the spec is better than it looks because the vast majority of ‘top’ hunters are not playing survival. If suddenly everybody played survival, it’s relative position to other specs would go up. Most competitive players simply aren’t playing it, and therefore it looks worse than it is.
Can say similar for MM too just to a slightly less degree.
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