The fact that Beastmaster wasn't made into the melee spec, or that Survival wasn't turned into a thrown weapons spec (which they totally could have), was a huge mistake.

@Bepples

Ай бұрын

Both of those ideas are also bad and would have been huge mistakes.

I came to survival after it was already melee and it ended up becoming my main spec. It’s not hard to imagine how much it must have hurt to lose ranged survival though, because I imagine it would have felt a lot like losing melee survival would feel for me. It’s a weird situation. It really shouldn’t be a zero summ game. I will say, that if BM was melee, I’d prefer that over survival, I think. Rexxar has always been my favorite character since W3.

I was excited for MoP Remix thinking we’d be able to play MoP specs, specifically to play OG Survival. Melee survival sucks

i hated cata as an expansion, but the only reason I'm playing it is cause my ranged survival is alive and well again.

survival just feels like they just throwed ten diferent fantasies and mixed it in one spec. Is it an explosive, gadget like spec? But it also has a beast bond connection like a beast master? Also has a strong focus on traps like a trapper? But it also has a classic spearman hunter moveset? Poisons, bleeds, bombs, beasts, traps, spears, harpoons, eagles, melee, ranged. It's just all over the place.

My man you are bringing back some of the worst memories from this game lol. I was a Demo warlock main in warlords of Draenor and I remember vividly how they nerfed the spec into the ground and Ion literally stated they didn’t want players to play the spec because they were adding illidan boys in Legion. Demo locks in WoD was one of the most fun specs I’ve ever played. I do remember playing survival in WoD. It was fun and the go to PvP spec. BM was the clear best option for a melee hunter, but shear incompetence guided their decisions I guess. Even to this day the spec is a mess. It’s a trapper, no wait, a bomber, no wait, a primal spear hunter, wait…. It has no clear theme and fails miserably to represent what a melee hunter should be.

They should have made BM melee and range, and called it a day; most of the abilities are the pet doing things anyways.

BM should be melee surv should be to use traps to avoid contact with enemy, to hold them, thrown them, something melee and poison/nature dmg. MM should be bleed, direct dmg from a very far distance. With all with some tricks in common.

@Bepples

Ай бұрын

Making BM melee would have caused just as much drama if not more.

@Rarkhatesppl

Ай бұрын

give survival traps back baseline and rework sentinel tree to give more synergies w arcane and steady shot

I don't even try in the game anymore after range survival was turned into a melee.

I am of two minds on this: I deleted my original Hunter, who was Ranged SV because they took away my melee weapon slot, and after the change to melee sv it brought me back to hunter because I have *always* wanted to play Rogue with a Pet, it still doesn't hammer that archetype home with its spears and bombs, but its as close as Ill get. However, Survival was my favorite spec from wrath to presumably WoD but again, I stopped playing the class in MoP? when they took "unneeded" slots away from classes (Ranged slot for warrior/rogue wands for casters, melee for hunters etc) Now ironically, even though I love new SV I just play BM because frankly speaking: If Im playing my hunter its literally because it's easier to perform on and I no longer care enough to want to be sweaty when chilling on a game after work

@Bepples

Ай бұрын

Quitting Hunter for that reason is ridiculous. It was still mostly the same class before and after 5.0. You denied yourself the most successful of all Hunter iterations in MoP over something so minor.

I love that you brought this up! I agree a 100% with you. Hunter is and has always been my Favorite spec. Wish they would just let you use mongoose strike with dual weapons

They can really draw from hunters from different types of cultures Apply them World of Warcraft But I completely agree with you About what they did to Hunters And especially survival Hunters in modern day wow.

Surv was my first love as a teenager raiding in WOTLK. Found the Light as an old man and play HPal. You said what needed to be said.

In reality Surv hasn't much to do with Rexxar and more with Huln Highmountain, but wait.. Huln wasn't throwing bombs left and right on those demons was he... Bombs are mainly used by engineers (tinker type class?). What kind of absolute nonsense is this spec? You either make survival into a Huln spec or a Rexxar spec not whatever it is currently- but then again RIP all you ranged survs.

RIP KING

On the one hand I understand _why_ they made SV the melee spec because in the original vanilla game design SV was the tree that focused on melee as poor as it was and with MM and BM being so popular ranged SV felt like a neglected middle child. On the other however melee SV has a bit of an identity problem; is it trying to steal BM's thunder? It stole Spirit Bond from them, along with the themes of being in tune with your pet and the wild. Why am I better friends with my pet as SV than BM? Also what is with the bombs and traps? How does that fit into being in tune with your pet? Yeah original SV used traps and elemental damage so bombs would have fit with that version of SV, but what does that have to do with pets? Seems antithetical to being off the grid survivalist to use a manufactured bombs and bear traps if you ask me. Now admittedly if you put on the thematic blinders current SV is fun, but this should have been BM not SV. Rexxar the signature melee hunter had the title of THE BEASTMASTER for years, but now he's been shamefully relegated to an SV hunter because of the fact he is melee. Now as a fun experiment I did find you could hypothetically make a current ranged SV build using the right talents, though it isn't perfect of course but serviceable if you want to fuck around but be ready for abuse if someone realizes what you are doing.

@havtor007

Ай бұрын

" because in the original vanilla game design SV was the tree that focused on melee as poor as it was" Survival was never a melee spec even in vanilla it was trap talents. Infact if you actually wanted to be melee hunter in vanilla you where better of being mostly BM hunter.

@Bepples

Ай бұрын

"with MM and BM being so popular ranged SV felt like a neglected middle child" In fact SV was usually fairly widely played. Throughout WotLK, Cata, and MoP it was generally either the most played or a close 2nd place. BM and MM swapped places being the least played. You're right that the SV fantasy is nonsense, which is ironic because the entire point of the melee rework was ostensibly to improve its identity.

@thenerdbeast7375

22 күн бұрын

@@havtor007 Lots of Vanilla Survival talents affected melee reread the tree sometime.

@havtor007

22 күн бұрын

@thenerdbeast7375 Yeah that is the thing about vanilla survival it was A TRAP to pick those talents. As someone who actually played hunter at the time I am fully aware of what you talk about but you are WRONG in thinking you played melee survival. Anyone who went down that route learned very fast those talents was just horrible and bad. Infact even the few people who tried to play melee hunter went BM with a sprinkling of survival.

Melee hunter in SoD is more rewarding than Retail survival lol Beastmaster shoulda been the melee spec, its like they were high in the office that day

@Bepples

Ай бұрын

Sorry but melee hunter in SoD is a joke. It's basically spamming 1 button for overtuned DPS. One of the most boring and shallow classes ever created.

I actually agree with you, that BM would've been the better spec to go melee. But to me, why not just leave Hunters with melee and ranged capabilities like they were for several expansions, until Blizzard wanted to get "creative". There was no reason to take away melee weapons for Hunters.

@Bepples

Ай бұрын

There were reasons to take away Melee weapons. Firstly, in all the time we had melee weapons, we had a 5 yard minimum range on all our ranged attacks and when closer we had to use a couple weak melee attacks. It was a significant handicap that only got worse as the game went on. Now they could have preserved the melee weapon slot and just removed the minimum range, but the other problem is it meant we competed with other classes for a weapon that for us was purely a passive stat stick. Not a good feeling. The best compromise IMO would be to introduce a cosmetic-only melee slot: you could equip a melee weapon there and it would appear on your character but it wouldn't give any stats.

No one hates current survival being melee, every is upset that the ranged one is gone, and no alternative to it, MM OR BM ranged just doesn't make up for it. Myself included. Ps. I love your class fantasy reasoning lol.

@Bepples

Ай бұрын

Actually a lot of people don't like current Survival being melee. The spec has genuine issues beyond just being a replacement for a far more popular prior spec.

Ranged survival was my first 2k as well. I enjoyed your complaints and share most of them. I would like to add how stupid it is that to think the best way to SURVIVE in battle would be to drop your ranged weapon and go try out close range combat 🤣

*...slowly pushes Barney back into my fanny pack* :D

I never understood melee hunters tbh

Yup it was the best hunter spec and turned it into a crappy melee spec it was my favorite BM is okay but yeah to many melee specs..

It is in the name. Survival should have always been a melee specialisation.

@havtor007

Ай бұрын

No it is not in the name survival actually is more of a ranged then melee name a survivalist has used ranged weapons for thousands of years

@Bepples

Ай бұрын

There are people who want Survival to be ranged, melee, tank, healer, and everything in between, and every single one of them insists that the name "Survival" specifically implies their vision for the spec. The fact is it was always an ambiguous name that doesn't specifically imply anything. Someone who prefers ranged SV could just as easily say that "Survival" implies staying at range because that's much safer and therefore you survive better by maximising your ability to make a distance and stay at a distance.

I love BM but he's right tho

Boklahoma gang!

I played since Vanilla, originally Survival had mostly skills that helped you to survive a melee and get out of it. It really only started to soar in WotLK. Explosive Shot and Serpent Sting. Now I don't have anything against a melee spec. I just wonder why it didn't hit the Beast Master spec, with Rexar being a Beast Master and being melee and all. I wonder why the melee spec plays SO CLOSE to the Beast Master spec, why can't I use dual wield like Rexar does. Now with Dragonflight they could have made it possible to have half the Survival tree be melee focused and the other half Ranged. You still have the ranged skills, thing is you can't evade Raptor Strike and most stuff, like Kill Shot, that is ranged for the other 2 specs as Survival it suddenly becomes a skill that requires you to use a melee weapon to use it. But yeah, I think, and that is me loving melee classes, the survival spec is not good designed. Yes you have a ton skills that you can use on 40 yards, what I would like more is if the spec would let YOU CHOOSE what weapon to use, be it spear, dual wield or a ranged weapon. So yeah. P.S. I dislike how Beast Master plays now. Before you used Kill Command as a special high damage move, now it is the main button you push. Ugh. Not to forget for some reason the pet doesn't pull aggro in Dragon Flight anymore, I keep have enemies in my face.

@Bepples

Ай бұрын

Thematically it would have made more sense to make BM melee, true. The reason they made Survival melee is because the developers believed it was just MM lite and it didn't have its own identity, and it also had melee-buffing talents in Classic. I disagree with that take but that's why they did it. However it's important to note that if they made BM melee it would cause many of the same issues, just with a different spec. It would cause massive controversy in the playerbase, very few Hunters would play it, and very few melee players would reroll for it. So it would be a controversial, disliked, and largely abandoned spec just like SV is now. Making BM melee instead wouldn't have suddenly fixed everything. The fact of the matter is there just aren't a lot of people who both want to play melee and want to play a Hunter so any approach to a Hunter spec being melee in its baseline would have been a failure.

@Momoka7

Ай бұрын

@@Bepples I don't want to argue here that making BM the melee spec, but... The way BM plays right now (keeping frenzy running using Serated Shot, to then mashing Kill Command and Bestial Wrath) it would have made not allot difference, if they turned it into the melee spec. But yeah in Classic throughout BC Survival had very few ranged skills, Vypern Sting being one of them and that is only a CC move. You are right, unless they reworked Survival into a ranged spec that has to juggle multiple dot attacks people would have disliked it. And there are already a couple classes that juggle dots(Shadow Priest, Affliction Warlock and Balance Druid to some degree). What had been better, is give the player a choice to run melee or ranged with the spec. I personally dislike that you are reliant to your pet, makes it feel like another BM spec, especially since you are limited to 2h weapons only.

@Bepples

Ай бұрын

@@Momoka7 I think melee BM might not be as unpopular as melee SV, just due to inertia and the whole pet collecting game, but it still would be unpopular. While it seems impossible now there were times in WoW's history before Legion where BM was so subpar that few people played it. In fact I think BM's perpetual popularity post-Legion is more of a result of the failures in MM and SV design since that time. While it would have more or less the same gameplay (just with ranged shots swapped with melee attacks), being melee instead of ranged would make a big difference to a lot of people. Going from being able to attack at 40 yards to not being able to do that will feel like a massive nerf no matter what and it's hard to market that fact away. Hunters by and large like the versatility of ranged combat so making BM melee would definitely drive a lot of people away. What they should have done is have some sort of talented melee stance within BM so people who like melee Hunter could do that while ranged people could avoid it. This would have also avoided the current situation where SV leans so heavily on BM's pet-based identity.

@Momoka7

Ай бұрын

@@Bepples I remember back in Vanilla, originally BM was a trash spec. Survival was also trash, unless your goal was to do PvP knowing you pull certain classes that have a very easy time killing you(Warrior, Rogue, "Melee" Mages) to you like a piece of fecal matter. Just because of the minimum shooting range, everyone and his mom thought a Hunter is easy prey. There was a time when I ran Survival where I kept slowing them and pop out of the 8 yards to take a couple shots only to pop back in to land Raptor Strikes and possibly a Counterattack(which rooted them). Was quite fun in Warsong Gulch, where they kept running after me... and I just broke LoS and let my pet whittle them down(yeah the rest was in BM). But yeah they could have simply added a 4th Spec for Hunters in Legion. Or never got rid of the Talent Trees and then make it possible to spec as BM and Survival into melee stuff. I remember in WoD they tried out so many funky things, among them the Warrior got that Talent that turned the Protection Warrior into a DPS class. I ran PvP with that, it was just so fun seeing people jump you thinking you are Tank and don't do damage only to find out that you are a DPS with 1h and shield, lol. They could have added ONE talent, that you can turn on and off, and that switches your kit from ranged to melee. The Protection Warrior had that, the Warlock had a permanent transformation that changed some skills and turned him into a "tank"(but you could not run dungeons like that lol, sadly).

Legion came out on August 30, 2016. It has been almost 10 years since this change. This is almost as bad as paladin that still complain about holy power. Come on man.

@curcicreations

Ай бұрын

to be honest holy power is a massive W for paladins when compared to pre cata paladin was trash anyway... it was only good in wotlk and onwards

@dionysues7449

Ай бұрын

@@curcicreations many paladins at the time wanted a more cooldown focused priority system without the holy power similar to WotLK's style but modernized. Blizzard came up with holy power while keeping some of the same feel, and it still rubbed people the wrong way. To this day you still get a small part of the paladin community up in arms about the change.

@Bepples

Ай бұрын

So? It was a ranged DPS spec for over a decade before that, and now we have classic WoW concurrently to the main game. Time doesn't just make prior issues irrelevant in WoW, and bad decisions don't become good decisions once enough time has passed.

Melee Survival is so good though. Harpoon is one of the most fun skills in the game. It’s a great mix of melee/ranged for damage and control. I love melee survival so much. I love getting in there and mixing it up. I do agree that they could have just made a new spec though.

@Bepples

Ай бұрын

Harpoon is just a rebranded charge. It's only exciting to melee-brained players who think getting up close and wacking things is exhilarating, and those types of players were never a good fit for the Hunter class. If it were such a fun and exciting spec it wouldn't consistently remain one of the most avoided and underplayed specs in the game.

@KevinG9012

Ай бұрын

@@Bepples isn’t BM one of the most played specs? It’s a complete snooze fest, so forgive me if I don’t go by what’s most played indicating a good spec. One of the most popular hunter characters in any fiction, Drizzt Do’Urden was a melee hunter. Rexxar is a melee hunter. Survival is great because it’s not just melee. You have multiple tools and can play between ranges. Also, when the last time charge was able to be used midair to grab onto someone flying by in open world pvp?

@Bepples

Ай бұрын

@@KevinG9012 This sounds like an argument that Hunters have bad taste and therefore what spec they like to play should be disregarded. Call me crazy, but when designing Hunter specs the interests and preferences of Hunters should come first. You can dismiss BM's popularity all you want, but evidently it does something right if it so consistently entertains that many players and it's worth looking at beyond "lol huntards just like easymode". Same goes for ranged SV. Evidently it got something right that melee SV didn't. You could argue that popularity isn't a good metric for success but then I wonder what would be a better one. It seems like the amount of people enjoying a spec is as close to an objective measure of the quality of a spec as you can get. A lot more people derived enjoyment from ranged SV than melee SV. You can't get around that fact. As for other melee Hunter characters in lore/other RPGs: who knows how popular or well known they actually are but it's a moot point because evidently their popularity did not lead to melee Survival being popular.

@KevinG9012

Ай бұрын

@@Bepples survival is rarely ever the highest tuned hunter spec. Last season of Shadowlands when wildfire cluster was busted suddenly SV was everywhere. People always play whatever is broken. I myself love melee Survival, I know plenty of other players who also do.

@Bepples

Ай бұрын

@@KevinG9012 Actually Survival has often been the highest tuned Hunter spec since becoming melee. What you're confused about is there's a difference between being 5% of second place v.s. 30% ahead, and in Shadowlands it was that overpowered (due to an overtuned borrowed power) to the point where it was a required pick to clear competitive content. It shouldn't have to be pointed out that most specs don't need to be >20% of literally everything else in the game to achieve any sort of decent representation and pointing to Shadowlands season 3 as proof that people might play melee Hunter is utterly pointless. Do you want them to overtune it by 20% every single patch? Actually, don't answer that. You know other people that like SV. Good for you! I know people who quit over it becoming melee. But besides useless anecdotes, we have real data that shows SV is a very unpopular spec. Right now in season 4 m+ there are 900k tracked BM Hunters, 160k tracked MM Hunters (itself a very troubled spec right now) and just 60k SV Hunters i.e. 5% of the class, and that's the representation the spec usually gets. We are far too many years into melee SV consistently faceplanting to pretend it's a tuning issue.

I love melee survival

@MrHuntervad

Ай бұрын

There is no problem with melee survival, but the fact they removed the old one with its own mechanics, gave back nothing, and also made the new one not good as Rexxar, made the ranged surv community very upset in general.

@Bepples

Ай бұрын

@@MrHuntervad Actually melee SV has a lot of problems.

@MrHuntervad

Ай бұрын

@@Bepples I mean as it existing, but gameplay-wise, sure it has a bunch, I even suggested once that it needs a rework, and a 4th spec.

@Bepples

Ай бұрын

@@MrHuntervad It has problems just by existing, too.

@MrHuntervad

Ай бұрын

@@Bepples Damage has been done, there is no fixing, they need to re-make the old sv from old scratch.

Survival sucks because they dropped the ball. Is it mele, is it ranged? It's literally neither... Survival would have been better as a Tank spec (survival) where you manage the threat between you and your beast and balanced two health bars. Survival is fun for a weekend, but it feels so clunky. It's frustrating because some classes / specs are great... and some others are just lame. Some comments on a random video are better ideas than what a team of paid designers can think up

@Bepples

Ай бұрын

No one wants Survival to be a tank. Terrible fit for the Hunter class. It would be even worse than melee SV.

@HermWasHere

Ай бұрын

@@Bepples no one, or just you? What would you rather have survival be?

Maybe you don't remember how many hunters were crying when they went full range class after years of being able to equip both a ranged and melee weapons. Sorry, but more people missed losing melee weapons than missed losing one ranged spec. The Survival class changes were welcomed by most. And it isn't just a melee class, It's a melee class with a hunter pet. My only beef with Blizzard is that it requires a two-hand weapon instead of the dual wielding melee weapons that use to be available. I earned Thunderfury on my Hunter and the hunter only weapon from the AQ40 quests is a one-hand axe. So, this is the state of the hunter class and its specs, and I'm fine with it other than dual wielding not being viable. Hunters don't need three specs with pets that require a ranged weapon. 1) Beastmaster - ranged hunter with one or two pets, including exotics. 2) Marksman - ranged hunter with one or no pets. 3) Survival - melee hunter with one pet. (And yes, this is a very strong spec and used more than you make it sound. It even comes with two ranged abilities [arcane shot and steady shot] if you want to macro weapons swapping with your attacks.)

@Bepples

Ай бұрын

This is ludicrous revisionism. Very few Hunters raised a fuss over no longer equipping melee weapons. In fact it was largely celebrated on Hunter discussion forums. In contrast Survival going melee was and still is immensely controversial. It sounds like you're projecting your own melee preferences onto the rest of the playerbase. Not everyone thinks like you do.

@storbokki371

Ай бұрын

@@Bepples You're wrong. And I had never played survival before the change. And hunters could equip a main hand, an off-hand, and ranged weapon all at the same time then. Even those that never used their melee weapons hated losing their stat sicks. No hunter was glad to see the removal of melee weapons. You're being ridiculous. The only thing hunters were glad to see removed was ammo.

@Bepples

Ай бұрын

@@storbokki371 Well it's your word against mine here but I did visit forums and posts from the time. Not all of them are still up but you can still find old discussions on websites that didn't remove them like wowhead and mmo-champion. There were a handful of people that didn't like the change but they were certainly in the minority. Most of the people in those threads were celebrating the change. If you never played SV before and got hooked on it now because of melee, good for you. There were a whole lot of players who played SV before and left because of melee. And the data shows SV now is always extremely unpopular, while during its ranged days it was very popular. So you have your own experience, but most other people have a different experience. You still seem to have a problem separating your own experiences from those of others, as if you consider yourself the main character. You should work on that.

@storbokki371

Ай бұрын

@@Bepples I lived it.

@Bepples

Ай бұрын

@@storbokki371 Cool story. If we're entirely depending on anecdotes, I "lived it" too and I encountered almost no one whatsoever who was upset at the removal of melee weapons. The only people I saw that were any kind of upset were a couple of forum posters who were DK & Paladin mains and wanted them to make a melee Hunter specs. Every single actual Hunter poster was otherwise in favour of it. Arguing that more Hunters were mad at the removal of melee weapons than Survival becoming melee is a delusional stance. If it were remotely the case then you wouldn't have 95% of the class sticking to the 2 ranged specs and consistent controversy about melee SV to this day. You're not fooling anyone.

I completely agree. I've been pushing for melee hunters as BM in sod and survival tree to be a hybrid melee ranged class. I have no idea how survival hunter was during that time because i quit by then but damn that sounds terrible and its actually laughable how much this dev misappropriated rexxar a BM hunter, why BM talents were created, as a survival hunter

isnt the point of survival to be meelee?

@Bepples

Ай бұрын

It used to be a ranged spec.

They can really draw from hunters from different types of cultures Apply them World of Warcraft But I completely agree with you About what they did to Hunters And especially survival Hunters in modern day wow.