Why are survival hunters unpopular?

Actually adding a 4th spec in the form of ranged SV without shorting out the state of the current will stretch the already thin line the themes of the Hunter specs draw from into a breaking point.

Current melee SV and MM both carry abilities from the old ranged SV and melee SV also carries BM abilities, I think you can understand the overlapping problem that this creates.

As for the old talent tree system, they wont go back there ever again. It needs a hell lot of work to create a good tree system and they already do a subpar work at the current system that is much more manageable.

The only problem is devs focus on specs over class I’ll be reserving judgement until holinkas shadow lands classes are out.

I trust holinka.

Oh and what I will say is if they bake ranged surv into MM seemlessly effectively two spdcs in one would work just fine

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The problem is the systems at play and their ability to improve on them.

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I 100% agree on the baking of MM and ranged SV. If it is done correctly it will create a very versatile and viable spec with more playstyles.

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I’ll be very interested to see what the class wise return of kill shot will mean for survival I guess it could jaust be like the serpent sting cross bow? Whip out and boom?

I can’t wait until kill shots back I’ve missed that ability so so much

Ooh youre survival? What’s the dps like? I’ve only played it in pvp really( I do love the pacing and abilities of survival though)

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No, it would not.


The fact that MSV borrows both BM abilities as well as some old SV-themed elements in general is not a necessity. It’s just a choice from the devs in terms of design.

They can easily steer it in another direction. The Legion-version of MSV actually managed to, a lot more than current MSV.

Having said that, some overlaps, at least when talking general themes and elements of design, is not a bad thing. It’s all part of the same class after all.



without shorting out the state of the current” BTW?

Sorry, not a native English speaker so would love it if you could expand on that a little.

Its a really hard spec to play compared to the other two and compared to most other specs in the game becuase of talents like mongoes bite and wildfire infussion being meta. Also it uses a melee weapon when the other two only used ranged, so its harder for a hunter who isnt surv to switch to surv. Another big reason is its way easier to level as bm and mm than it is surv, even with a pet doing some of the tanking in surv i find i get aggro a lot more than the other two specs. Finally I just find that people want ranged dps more than melee in raids.

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I think your dead wrong here Blizz can come up with some new stuff, we have thousands of years worth of human hunter gatherer history to draw from im sure they can differentiate the two specs. Assassination and subtlety are pretty damn similar already, then if you think about the fact that both specs are getting poisons next expac there will be even more similar yet no one says they are the same.

You don’t use wildfire unless you somehow don’t have Blur of Talons trait, otherwise the specc is very very simple and straight forward to play just like the whole class is, pressing mongoose bite and KC for focus regen ain’t hard.

PvP can get you a free 440 weapon, WQs give weapons quite often as well.

It’s equally as easy to lvl as surv as it is as BM or MM, difference is just having to run to most mobs.
Raids is usually ranged in favor of melee, that knowledge is as ancient as raids themselves are tbh.

In M+ is not the same you’ll have to used all you got. It’s not a Meta spec but it’s very intense/fun to play in M+ (for me).

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At the moment SV lacks a bit of focus. As I said it is a mismatch of BM and some old SV abilities, so it needs a focused direction in order to actually attain a solid identity as a spec.
The class will be unpruned next expansion which is great news, but currently all specs lack depth and identity. Blizzard failed to deliver what they thought they were doing right, and that needs to be addressed with the unpruning.

Also overlaps are bound to happen and that is fine, when it comes to general abilities, but specializations are named the way they do because they SPECIALIZE in an aspect of the class giving you more tools towards that direction. So core abilities that define a spec are not shared between the specs, check the class design in MoP and backwards for examples.

Personally i believe that adding extra specs isn’t an answer to our problem. Stretching the fantasy of the class thin isn’t a move forward. What we need is to solidify the core class first. Tools like the PvP talents and making them available options in PvE will open up a lot of ideas for the class and specs to be solidified even further without the need for a 4th spec.
Reorganizing and reworking the 3 current specs? I’m all for it.
Adding a 4th one? I don’t see the need or use for it.

I fail to see the similarities of Assassination and Subtlety, since one spec is about specializing in poisons and the other about specializing in shadow tricks. It is a very clear cut difference in play-styles and and identities.
The fact that Sub is getting poisons doesn’t mean it specializes in it. Rogues had poisons in all their specs since day one, but that didn’t change the fact that, one spec specialized in them making them stronger and bringing more poison options to the table.
Same goes with Hunters, all specs had poisons and traps but Survival was specialized in them, as MM was specialized in Shot abilities and so on, so forth.

Blizzard already has a problem balancing the existing 36 specs, they don’t want more on their plate, it was made apparent with the introduction of DH in Legion. The very first class with only 2 specs, because as they themselves said, there was no reason to have a 3rd one.

Also what I replied to Briz, above completes my point of view.

As far as core abilities go, I though that as well yes.

But as evident with current MSV, apparently not. Kinda strange considering their past statements as to why they decided to remove RSV in favor of bringing in MSV.

Worth noting though is that Survival currently, contrary to both BM and MM, does not have a name that highlights it’s intended focus.

While I appreciate the idea, the thing is that it would not work out that well when you put PvP and PvE next to one another.

They are different types of content that require different elements of design in order for the class to work well.

Having said that, I would prefer something like the old Glyph-system instead of Honor-talents as a way to provide those more situational effects used depending on the type of content.

Also, what you’re talking about, at least based on how it sounds would not really achieve the old RSV playstyle for those of us that wants it back.

It sounds like you just want to improve existing elements slightly, where needed.

The problem with large reworks like we’ve seen in the past is that they will always upset the players who are currently happy with what a spec provides.

Vastly changing for example MM to somehow fit a half-realised version of RSV in there, would not be a good solution. For one it wouldn’t really bring everything we want from RSV back.
Second, it would require them removing a lot of things that are already part of MM, affecting it’s very core design.

There was no reason to add a third one from their point of view based on what themes and fantasies they wanted that class to cover.

Not saying that there isn’t something yet to explore, but I really doubt they opted out of adding a third spec to the class based on added difficulties of tuning/balancing.

I don’t know if you are aware but many of the pvp “talents” are abilities that were taken away from the core class in order to prune it in the first place.
All I’m suggesting is to remove the gating between PvP and PvE, and bring the abilities back into the class as a whole, since this gating was only recently introduced in Legion and only worked towards the pruning of class abilities, which turned out to be unpopular with the players and a disaster for class identity.

I’m all for bringing RSV back, I’m not all for having 4 specs for no reason. As I mentioned in my very first post in this thread my dream would be to take some things out of BM and delete it, then give these things to MSV and make it the new BM since to me personally it feels much more of close to the BM theme than the current BM design itself, and bring back the RSV in the place of MSV.

So Im all for 3 specs, MM, MBM(based on MSV) and RSV.

Oh yeah absolutely M+ and Raiding are different builds, former favoring Latent Posion/Wildfire Infusion over BoT/BoP build.
Doesn’t change the fact that the spec is straight forward to play, which is my point.

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I don’t know how you cant see the similarities they are both stealthy specs that use daggers to inflict damage. Also subtlety doesn’t use “shadow tricks” thats a game mechanic the theme is still just actual stealth, not shadow magic. So essentially one spec is just using stealth to stab the enemy and poison them whereas the other is literally doing the same thing but without the poison.

Also sub getting poisons is not like hunters getting traps, because when surv actually specialised in traps we lost most baseline traps. Subtlety getting poisons is like if all hunters got access to call trops steel trap, snake trap and maybe baseline bombs.

Moving on tho don’t shill for blizzard they are a multi million if not billion dollar company if they are having issues balancing specs they can hire people who can. On the subject of DH the reasons they didnt add a 3rd spec was 1. it didn’t fit the theme at all, there was no thematic basis they could have gone off to make a 3rd spec they barely had enough lore for the tank spec. 2. Mechanically they very obviously didnt have enough ideas to differentiate a 3rd spec from other clases seeing as the tank spec borrows quite a bit from dk 3. its blatantly the noob class and so they wanted to keep it as simple and as brain dead as possible.

When they bring in tinkers they will make it a 3 or maybe even a 4 spec class because robots and mechs are such a blank slate it will allow them the freedom to basically make the thing from the ground up without any real restrictions.

Wildfire was meta for pretty much this whole expansion

The PVP weapons and the WQ weapons are almost allwasy like 10-20 ilvls under raiding weapons

Your 3rd point is just a flat out wrong, BM especially is at least 5-10x easier to level then surv. Are you seriously going to sit there and tell me the 10% extra healing from a rhino pet + 50% boost in leach and 30% boost in damage from aspect of the beast + the fact that 60% of the damage is coming through your pet so it generates way more aggro does nothing. No no no you are wrong, BM isnt just miles above surv its the best levelling spec in the game. Therefore once a player gets to max level and wants to pick a spec for damage they wont pic surv, because the only pole arms available will be like 20% damage reductions.

I have to ask, what expansion did you start to play the game?

Not really, it was/is the better choice to use if you don’t have any Blur of Talons traits or do M+ with Latent Poison traits.

Yet they remain weapons, you never specified they had to be raid equilavent in item level. Nonetheless they remain a viable option, with PvP scaling upto raid ilvl as your rating goes up.

All three speccs are equally easy to level, BM may be in circumstances better but if you quest then all 3 are equally viable, for dungeons there’s such a small margin where BM might pull ahead, but its neglible.
Source: I play all 3 speccs and I have a few Hunter alts at various level gaps I play on occasion
As for max level content, you see more BMs are BM is very easy to pull numbers on with one universal specc build while Surv can do both ST and AoE but can only do one good at a time, not to mention Ny’alotha fights are more suited for BM than Surv or MM (RIP 2-target cleave).

Do you even play the game? Or are you just here to spew nonsense?

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Not entirely sure about how many, but yeah, I knew there were some former baseline abilities put in there.

I would argue the gating in itself isn’t the main issue but more the specifics about how they did it. And what was chosen to be put in there.

Again, there needs to be some form of choice available to us to allow for changes(albeit somewhat minor ones in many cases) to account for whether you’re doing PvP or PvE(along with what sub-section of such you engage in).

Not everything can be tacked on to the class baseline.

But again, yeah, the whole approach to prune abilities and then put them back in as talent options for whatever reason(lack of other ideas?) is not a good one.

No reason?

How about the fact that it’s the most unintrusive way to get the spec/playstyle back without it hurting existing specializations?

As, like with what they did going into Legion, it’s well established that removing or vastly changing existing themes in order to fit something else in there, is doing nothing but upsetting players currently happy with the spec(s) in general.

Fair enough if you would want something like this but…what about all others who want to keep the current specs and their respective themes?

I hear surv is a “sleeper” OP spec, not many play it, so noone is whining.

I don’t play it because I rolled a hunter to get my “ranged” fix in BGs, and MM is kinda good for that. Will try surv tho and see what’s the fuss is about :smile:

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