What are the current numbers though? I hardly see any survival hunters in the open world, dungeons or BG’s, but I didn’t see any during legion either. You’d think if barely anyone is playing them they would revert back sooner or later.
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I think its a mistake to assume that you will ever get an “old” version of any spec back. Even if SV had stayed a ranged spec, it wouldnt be the one you remember from pre-Legion. Just look how MM has changed since WoD!
I was a big fan of the new melee SV in Legion, but in BFA it feels a lot clunkier. I agreed with Blizz back when they argued that MM and old SV were too similar, but the truth is that the same can now be said about SV and BM.
The Hunter class wouldnt really lose much at this point if Blizz decided to make BM abilities work with melee and ranged weapons alike and take SV into another direction entirely, like a midrangy throwing weapons spec for example, with Lone Wolf option like for MM.
There is no point in assuming anything when it comes to class development in WoW. We’ve seen several times how drastically things can change all of a sudden. To expect that things will turn out a certain way…
I can’t overstate how much I would like to hear the reasoning behind the design of the Hunter class. To hear from those responsible for it’s development across the expansions.
As for statements made towards the similarities between the old ranged SV spec and MM. I mean…yeah sure, both specs had pet influences and talents/abilities centered around the use of pets. But the actual core abilities tied to Survival(I speak of Explosive Shot, Black Arrow, Serpent Sting as they are what really made Survival for me), these certainly did not have their likes within the MM spec and the way you utilized them in combat.
If MM and SV actually were too similar to one another. I wouldn’t have minded to play both specs when that was an option. However, I did NOT. There was a reason as to why I stuck with Survival.
The irony is that, considering what made for the core of Survival as it used to be with it’s ranged abilities. And the steps they’ve taken from Legion and forward with Spec fantasy. They could’ve focused it even more on the use of unique venoms/posions + combining it with enhanced traps that neither of the other 2 specs would have access to. But…they did not.
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i played sv than and now and i think now its better than then i mean look u have proccs if u dont want em or not is your choice
Old sv was amazing, keeping the dots up etc. But the new sv is fine too. Why not just bring old sv back and have the new one too? Druid has 4 specs too. This sounds quite abstract so it’s probably not gonna happen unless everyone demands it.
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i have no problem keeping the new spec its ok if somone likes it but the thing is alot hunters prefers the old one . so y having both of them is good for all
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Honestly old survival felt more like playing a shadow priest than a hunter, the gameplay was dull and required no effort other than hitting buttons as they light up, this is coming from someone that played SV exclusively since previous expansion when it got drastically changed
Current survival is the most complete a hunter felt in years despite how few buttons classes have nowadays, it is an odd mixture between melee and ranged evenly being spread out but requires a utilization of both to work properly
The mechanic to return player focus resource through an active pet ability is both good and healthy game design and it makes the pet more valuable than BM ever made it, despite its name
SV is on a good path to be what BM was always supposed to, though I would much more prefer it to be a tanking specialization since we all agree that DPS only classes with three specializations after 15 years are dumb game design and boring to play, no reason to pick any of the three classes when you could be playing a druid that can tank/melee/ranged/heal
Survival hunter fantasy best fits a gladiator type fighter holding a spear in one and a net in other hand and Legion had some good ideas but most of them were scrapped. I wouldn’t exacly call it better than the current iteration because 80% of total damage was from Mongoose Bite spam, other 10 abilities amounted to 10% and autoattack was the last 10%
What it did good
- tracker’s net instead of wingclip (TN is now a pvp talent), wingclip is rarely used because how expensive it is to recast it (SV is basically a UNHOLY DK, that has ranged slow and interrupt)
- caltrops were fun and felt unique, now we have stupid tar trap (OIL WHY?)
- bear trap could be used instead of freezing, am I a fighter or a mage?
- flanking strike, that is now a useless talent instead of stupid attack we share with BM
- bleeds instead of poisons, although serpent sting is nice for pulling and prefer it over the stupid axe throw we had in Legion
what feels really bad now
- serpent sting feeling useless without Latent Poison since you’re chain spamming Mongoose bite most of the time, Hydra bite should be enabled by default, with haste being the most desired stat, it feels weak
- bombs being nice but the azerite trait that reduces cooldown by 1 sec for each raptor/mongoose feels more than mandatory since all builds are grenade-centric, also people hate it for the frontal cone explosion, stop making our life hard and make it a proper AOE around the target
- carve being the most useless ability ever, just replace it with butchery, which noone picks at all, but people love it since it does proper 360 degree damage rather than a frontal cone, ability feels useless, does no damage, looks uninteresting and is used for nothing else but reduce bomb cooldown
- pvp talents that offer nothing beyond heals and overall utility, every other class has a damage dealing talent, feels extremely boring in the open world
- mastery stat feels completely useless, scaling is weak and I feel that a lot of its potential power was reduced in favor of extra passive heal it offers in addition to boosting damage, that self heal component needs to drastically be increased, thanks for the 2% hp heal every 5 seconds LUL
- many other talents were Legion passives and feel stupid to take because of how little they offer, and should be baseline (harpoon reset at least, which basically has some damage tied to the talent but that damage and focus return is negligible)
- no usefulness at all in a group, every class has a silence, stun, interrupt, slow - hunters always did hard jobs in a raid and they were best at it, one of the reasons I kept playing after all this time, if a hunter can do something, other classes can do it better now, Bloodlust can now be offered by trade professions, increase demand in survival hunter by giving a physical damage debuff by default, everyone probably noticed the 2 rogue+ windwalker specs in MDI streams by now
- single target damage heavily revolves around Mongoose Bite spam and not breaking the sequence or letting the buff drop, in Legion I remember melee attacks by SV having slightly increased range, something like Acrobatic Strikes that rogues have now, we carry a spear after all
Main problem is that right now the specialization feels half-assed and incomplete, best start with cosmetic and practical improvements to increase popularity. SV hunter is still being looked at as the red step child for last three years despite by not being any worse than most other melee.
If people still see playing melee as a disadvantage over not playing ranged, buff the spec and make adjustments like I mentioned to increase demand for it in groups.
Too bad that the beta forums got deleted, it was full of many great ideas by people who want to see improvements rather than re living their nostalgia for something that felt smooth to play but overall had no interaction between abilities and made it no different from the other specialization.
Hunter was a complete trainwreck and it took years to get rid of deadzone, ammo and mana as a resource, as soon as it started looking like something unique, they gave every other class same abilities and stopped all work on hunters.
The worst thing about melee survival is the 1.5 second default global cooldown, it requires a lot of haste to make it any fun to play. People will just flock to melee classes that have 1.0 default instead, because it feel smoother to play.
I understand that haste reduces global cooldown and that of certain abilities, but it feels frustrating and very slow, exact opposite of a class that has to spam abilities, it is not like we take four seconds time out to strike the enemy with an equivalent of a melee Chaos Bolt. 1.5 feel fine on a ranged, but not on a melee specialization, and is probably one of the reasons people don’t play SV.
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So many contradictions in the above post. You say current SV is the most complete Hunter spec to date yet you also say it feels half-arsed and incomplete. So which is it?
SV is already doing more damage than BM and MM but you want to see it buffed more to attract greater interest. Most people realise that SV offers nothing that every other melee spec can do better.
SV isn’t unique with its 1.5 sec global CD. All Hunters have had to endure it for years while other ranged DPS specs had a 1 sec global CD. Stupid game design if you ask me but then Hunter has always been the redhead stepchild of WoW.
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You probably didn’t watch the MDI streams where the base group composition had not changed since it started. Two rogues and a windwalker monk. Entire team is playing as Night Elves. The monk isn’t particularly powerful except he provides a melee damage debuff to buff rest of the team even further, including a druid with Feral affinity.
Pulls of 20 or more mobs at a time, group stealthing over large portions of the dungeon, using Shadowmeld to avoid The Reaping mechanic and.
It feels like playing Diablo rifts, and no doubt the majority of people who tried it once got tired of this back in 2013. The entire dungeon feels to be dependent on one thing alone, damage output. It feels silly that over so many years of experience in game design no one predicted this would happen, especially when the majority of the raiding scene is already playing horde for the very racials that gave them a competitive edge in the first place.
So when I says “feels fantastic but infinished” I’m thinking more about the current expansion as a whole and not only one class.
Face it; mages, warlocks, hunters and rogues are in a problematic spot because as soon as one specialization starts pulling ahead slightly, no person will ever play the other two, and this sucks greatly when you can only play as a damage dealer. You still have pretty much every tool that the other two have you will ever need in PVE environment and it feels like complete failure the game designers allowed it to come to this.
With all the ability pruning and removal of bonuses including those provided by sets, people will naturally flock to a class that offers more, and that will not spend its evening gaming session waiting in a queue or getting turned down while applying to groups, because of DPS over-saturation.
There are some good design ideas in place, and there were many other in Legion for the melee hunter. But it all still feels bad to play, Believe me, I have 8 classes at max level that I made to experience Legion storylines, but everything is less fun to do after the artifacts were scrapped. Classes just feel boring.
Designers should completely start over, combine best of ranged playing experiences into MM which can play with or without the pet, turn BM into what a true melee specialization is that utilizes the pet to the max, and convert SV into a tank that does not use a pet at all in a conventional way.
Also convert one of the rogue specializations into a tank, turn one of the mage specs into a healer (time magic btw) and do something interesting with a warlock, I’m bad at figuring what that would be fantasy-wise.
That’s how you fix the game as a whole, rather than adding stupid new classes for story purposes, create some balance. Three classes can play EVERY role in the game, while the four classes are limited to DPS only. With that thought in mind, any discussion about returning the old survival is pointless. Whatever you feel lacking in terms of class fantasy can be adjusted through talents and other bonuses.
No, people have been wanting melee hunter for forever, what needs to change is the dull BM rotation of just keeping track of barbed shot.
But svs rotation is easier than bms rotation
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If I’m honest I really like the new survival, it actually feels unique. Old survival felt like a variation of MM to me.
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With the changes to marksmanship, you now literally have the old survival hunter… you demand for something that is already in the game.
Or do you mean the old melee survival that was more bestial and brutal, if thats the case then fair enough
ehm … no?
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what particular aspect does it not have then other than black arrow which makes just as little sense as arcane shot does.
I mean seriously you have:
Serpent sting.
Explosive shot.
baseline version of barrage.
Aimed shot (surv always specd this when it was possible to do so).
even Lock and Load.
Like seriously the only thing MM can’t get that survival got is black arrow which was removed, likely because it wasn’t really fitting for a hunter to be shooting scourge arrows at people. But if they wanted to put it back into the game they would need only remove Streamline, maybe make that as black arrow replacing rapid fire.
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When people say old sv they usually mean the cata + version of it.
Which was a 100% mobile dot based hunter spec. Which current mm isnt.
Also the core of old sv was explosive shot + black arrow and their interaction with lock and load which is very different from current mm even if speced into lock and load and explosive shot.
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We have this once again yes. Finally!
The current Explosive Shot MMs have in their talent tree is an abomination. It works nothing like Explosive Shot used to prior to Legion. Sure, it has the same name, but that’s about it.
This was never an ability specifically suited for Survival. Most hunters just used it because it was quite the AoE-ability back then. If you ask me, an ability such as this one should NOT even be a part of the Hunter toolkit. It does not fit with WoW at all.
Many hunters did so yes. However, Aimed Shot is the signature for MM. Have never been so for Survival. Survival as a spec wasn’t supposed to be the one-shot/hard-hit spec.
True, MM now has a version of the old L&L. But it’s nowhere near it’s past glory days.
Black Arrow is not “scourge arrows”. Or I should say, it wasn’t so in the past. The whole “dead boar-combat ally” thing we got, was introduced in Legion. Prior to that, the ability was thematically meant to be a shot where you coated your arrows/bullets in a self-mixed poison. It really didn’t have anything at all to do with the Scourge.
And as far as Survival as a spec goes, thematically, this was what it was all about. A spec where you had some interaction with your pet but most of your focus was on the use of your ranged weapon(more specifically, the use of various animal venoms/poisons as well as explosives that you applied to your arrows/bullets).
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Kinda fine with current Surv, kinda want old Surv which imo was the only unique hunter specc i.e DoT based unlike BM and MM.
Though I’m still in “Camp BM should have been melee can’t change my mind”.
But I don’t care what iteration of Surv we have, Survs always been the most fun to play.
my honest opinion is that they should have placed the old survival mechanics into beast mastery and not marksmanship due to the fact the BM has always been somewhat lacking.
sure if u like the melee spec why not but dont DELETE the Ranged one . keep it alot of ppl love the spec . and i am one of them .
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