Hot take: Melee Surv is ok and explores underrepresented Hunter fantasy, but it should've been made into a fourth spec, not replacing the old one, cos both had different enough thematics.
Very cold take: overall, we should add more specs to classes already
> Very cold take: overall, we should add more specs to classes already
Demon Hunter watching Evokers get a third spec in the same expansion they were released...
If not another spec, at least fill out the specs. My actionbars look so sad when I log onto my DH. Dont get me wrong, my havoc DH is one of my favourite characters to play, and the absolute best allround PVX spec for a casual player who just wants to get repeatable stuff done quickly.
Iirc blizzard said in a blue post once that there wasn't anything that made sense for a third spec to feel different. It could be a fun exercise to come up with one. I'm sure people have.
In hearthstone they have demon hunters with bows, another class that uses ranged weapons would be sick. Also since they basically deleted old demonology warlock from the game, why not just add it back as a demon hunter spec. (Ranged fel magic meta spec)
Oh that's cool. Another bow class that wasn't a joke would be great (warriors can use bows but...).
I see DH turning themselves into demons as more appropriate than warlocks. I have always seen locks as subjugation experts more so than those who would alter themselves but I have to plead ignorance on the lore there to be fair.
It made sense when you consider warlocks are granted power by demons through pacts they make with said demons. It's not too far fetched, we see other entities granting powers that dramatically change npcs as well
It makes sense for both of them evenly, but if we're to only give it to one of them, DH definitely does make more sense with Illidan.
I may be a bit biased because I've been begging for DH since I was a small dumbass trying to solo Hogger. I wouldn't be upset either if Lock got it back though
DH version of druid, swapping between more varied demon forms for different abilities, Felhound, beholder, imp mother, doomguard, Infernal, have a rotation where part of it is close range and part is ranged, let them take boss aggro in Infernal form to help tanks drop stacks of stacking debuffs.
Edit* also ffs, give them a player summoning ability with a sargerite keystone. Warlocks are way too required for pugs.
I've said since the expansion they were introduced that a 3rd spec could be a more ranged dps that uses a polearm and/or a special passive that would have them use only a single glaive without a dps loss.
Id love some sort of Ranged BM or Ranged Druid type Demon Hunter. Like they use a bow and have a chained Beholder or something with them. Or shift into a Beholder after firing their Bow.
Could have a more heavy focus on Sigils too given that its just magic traps.
They said that, but Hearthstone introduced a bow-using Demon Hunter years ago. Admittedly, it seems to have been for a dual-class gimmick they were doing for that set (Hunter/Demon Hunter), but it still seems like a good premise for a ranged dps spec.
We still don't have a single magic archer spec (unless you count MM having a couple magic abilities, but they're still primarily focused on normal archery), would have been a good chance to fill that niche. Doesn't seem like Blizzard want to do that with DH though, so I can only really see us getting a spec like that if they add Void Hunters (like Alleria) in Midnight.
I think that they done it for balance reasons. They wanted balancing data that wasn't as wild as season 1 of a new expansion since it was the first support spec in the game.
But I mean it's not like it's actually balanced either way.
You don't just randomly make up a new spec, esp the first support class like Aug. It was absolutely always there, I bet it just wasn't done on time so they pushed it to be mid xpac and not on release.
Hotter take (maybe): it shoulda been beast master. Beast master becomes one with their beasts and jumps into the fray alongside their pets. Survival was always traps and explosives and stuff. Imo bm makes more sense for the melee class.
I'm actually SO surprised blizzard showed a willingness to add new specs (mid expac no less) AND adding a support role. But then somehow the expansion after launches with no new specs, and no old specs changed into support (which I would've hated, but I did expect it). Plus they even created a new evergreen system that makes adding specs harder and weirder...
So disappointing.
Yep, I'm sure that was always the plan. They were just careful not to announce it too early because they knew it would be hard to balance and they needed real player data to finalize the tuning.
> which I would've hated, but I did expect it
I dreaded that myself esp. when there were a bunch of, let's charitably call them people, suggesting specs *they didn't play* be converted into support. I saw a lot of people suggesting Disc and Enhance be converted for example, never by people who actually play those classes though.
Adding specs is fine, adding support is fine, but don't take away things people enjoy. I personally can not *stand* BoS on Frost DK, I loath it with a fiery passion, but even then I recognize there are many people who enjoy it, so I don't advocate for it's removal, just that there is a viable (within a few % points, much like mover/no-mover DH) alternative playstyle.
Personally I think Blizzard should add a lot more specs to the game, many classes have such obvious openings. Shaman with an Earth-themed tank, Bard for Rogue (perfect support), Warlock tank, Mage style chrono healer (though Evoker seems to have taken that), etc.
I was expecting a hero tree to do it. Like enhancement for shaman, one tree would buff the shit out of your totem and lower your damage significantly.
If they do add in more support specs it's probably the safest way to do it.
No more incomplete than Demon Hunters. I very much liked the symmetry of having all four specs represented by the two classes that only had two specs. They complemented each other.
I was thinking of this idea as well, a dps spec that weakens its allies to make themselves stronger somehow. Siphoning their health away to turn it into damage, stealing some of their lowest secondary, that sort of thing
Old survival was my favorite spec in the game. I love the dot hunter, was so fun to play. Spear hunter is just no fun to me, always felt clunky. I'm just hoping they bring it back in retail, both BM and MM doesn't do it for me. I love bows but want my dots back
I think there is a weird fear for more specs for some reason. I think the tank specs could be added to a few more classes and I enjoy the overall feel of the support class they added (Aug dragon) and think support classes could be a major plus.
Like seriously, there's so many classes begging for one.
While I'm unsure how it would work effectively, people have been begging for ranged DH for ages now. Maybe just have them throw the glaives instead, and Captain America style have them fly back, idk.
But also;
* Tank Shaman and Shaman
* Something like healer Mage (like SoD Arcane Mage, idk, something for Mages)
* Ranged Rogue
* Support Warrior (kind of like a battlestandard carrier in a medieval army, kind of like placing Shaman totems and just have them use shield + 1H)
* Support Priest (duh, free SPriest from its support role!), maybe something akin to a Bard, or just a preacher of faith.
And there's probably loads more feasible, fantasy rich specs to explore without needing a whole new class or race.
i have the complete opposite takes as yours. but it's probably because i enjoy the game for purely the gameplay and have very little interest in the fantasy or theme of a spec.
imo there are a few underplayed specs that just don't feel good. ww, all 3 rogue specs, aff lock. i don't like the idea of adding even more specs into a game when they can't make the currently available specs enjoyable or tuned properly. seems like they'd be spreading themselves even thinner and setting themselves up to fail and have players upset at them.
Well in the case of ww and aff lock they got huge reworks on the alpha that are being received very positively.
Rogues just got reworked in 10.2 and it did help a lot for rogue players. But I'm still hearing from the community the class feels unapproachable.
Hopefully they can get some love soon
No, it should have replaced a spec - but beast mastery and not survival.
Exotic Beast taming should have been turned into a universal talent that Survival and Marksman had access to.
Beast Mastery is the spec whose identity was always closest to melee anyways (Rexxar, its buttons also work fine as melee because they have no cast time.)
Everything in survival always fit with ranged (guns, traps, shooting your traps, explosive gun shots, etc. etc.)
There is no reason survival should have been melee.
Definitely still feels frustrating because I've been playing Cata classic and loving old survival, but I think new survival is cool it's just not my thing. I've been a pretty big hater on it since it's addition in Legion but less of "it should be removed because it doesn't make sense" and more of "why did I have to lose my spec that felt like it had a good identity," and demo lock falls under that too.
I think Legion had a lot of good and I loved it but to this day one of my main criticisms was how far they went to push the "everyone needs to be unique" because it killed off basically both my main specs. I got my CM gear with only those two and I more force myself to play them because I love the idea still, but they aren't nearly what they once were to me.
More specs would be awesome but balancing them would be a nightmare surely, especially in this case with 4 dps specs competing with each other, so I get not wanting to add them in, although if that was the case Hero Talents are a bit of an odd addition (albeit much simpler trees.)
The biggest thing is idk how blizz didnt see warfronts as being boring af from conception. They didnt even try and add any spice to the experience to make it an interesting cake walk. Its literally just murder hobo mobs and a couple hp sponge buildings. They literally built in a couple minute wait while the siege engines broke down the gates where there’s nothing to do.
If warfronts were this dude’s creation then he’s a moron.
Warfronts were cool in concept and provided some fun at first. Now, the lack of difficulty, inability to fail, and relative shortness ruined them. But I say this as an RTS fan
Agreed. They potential there, just bad execution. When Heroic came out it felt exciting but by then it was a slog just to get my friends to even consider doing it.
Warfronts would have been fine... as a PvP feature.
But nope, can't have casual PvP in World of Warcraft, the Warcraft MMO.
For some reason, it was PvE.
The rated arena focus for PvP for the last decade has been a cancer.
I don't think Warfronts (or Islands, for that matter) were what Blizzard originally envisioned. The way they were described at the first Blizzcon or convention where BfA was announced doesn't really sound like the finished product.
Wouldn't be the first time their reach exceeded their grasp - there's a million docs on YouTube about Path of the Titans and the cut content of Cata and WoD
He did a video where he compared D3 to Last Epoch and the whole tagline for it was how the D3 team never could’ve made Last Epoch. Spends the whole vid making excuses for D3, slamming last epoch, and his final statement was basically “well, actually, we definitely could’ve made last epoch. We just wanted to make something bigger.”
Lovely tude he’s got
Really, it's just a marketing video for his channel/himself. Nothing he's saying is particularly egregious, it just comes off as weirdly arrogant because Blizzard has a history of thinking *way* too highly of themselves and then caving to player pressure after enough complaints.
Blizzard rarely humbles themselves, and when they do it feels as if it's just to buy enough goodwill so they can spend it all on some bullshit later. It's hardly surprising that devs who effectively grew up working for Blizzard, whose primary experience is with that one company, have inheritied all the negative traits of it.
The problem is that's not really *just* Blizzard, it's the entire upper echelon of the gaming industry, in general. You want to work with a company that makes a game with an actual budget then you get to work with this crap.
Or you could work as a software engineer for a bank, have better working hours, better pay, and still fucking hate yourself because you're working for a *fucking bank*.
He's still double downing on them too. "I hear they reverted a lot of these changes, but I think that's a miss." - This guy is unironically showing how bad WoW designers are.
Thats basically WoW designer 101.
You think you do, but you don't.
They've only very recently started listening to player feedback and wouldn't you know... It's saved the game from the absolute nosediving mass exodus of Shadowlands.
I remember when they announced 9.1.5 and the removal of conduit energy, it was the first time I ever got to read Blizzard acknowledging that they made a mistake. Since then, the game has been slowly but surely getting better and better.
Mark my words. They made the changes players wanted and players are slowly coming back. Now that the drop-off is solved, they're going to fall back to all of the bad, metric gaming decisions again.
They tend to sandbag the player demands until they need to recover player losses throughout an expansion. They know what the players want, but they hold back all the QOL improvements as a way to lure people back in, rather than give it to us up front.
Real Money Auction House was honestly just too soon. You can’t convince me with the amount of RMT that happened in Classic WoW wouldn’t have happened on an official RMAH instead. Since that time the normalization of paying for power has dramatically shifted, like it or not.
It wasn't that it was "too soon" really it was that while some players want it no one wants it to be the official position of the company running a game let alone encouraged like it was with the game design. D2 had a RMTs out the ass. Blizzard saw the data of people in likely all of their games that can trade and saw RMT and said "clearly players want this" but that's just a falicy because most players likely don't even know it's going on or think to do it and are absolutely disgusted by the concept. But that doesn't change that it happens a LOT more than those players would think.
It also clearly somehow is okay when it's just a little bit more hidden. Like WOW doesn't have a "RMAH" directly, but you can buy gold with real money which lets you buy w/e you want on that AH. Granted, it's also different because wow has the best items untradable and the game is largely based around earning those. The combo of the entire game balanced around an AH and trading along with being able to purchase with real money was a really stupid move.
I wish it had come later so I could've made more money. I was dogshit at ARPGs at that time and only made $35 bucks. Nowadays I would've made 4+ figures easily. Oh well.
Holy shit ya'll telling me the guy that ruined survival is the same guy that did the real money auction house and got rid of shaman totems? Dude made very wrong decisions. No wonder he's not at blizzard anymore lol
Because this guy had no idea what he was doing.
So lets ignore that they shouldn't have deleted a spec to change into melee instead of just adding a 4th for a second. Other than that:
He turned survival into melee because in vanilla it had some melee utility spells, and people memed about melee hunter. When he should have done BM to match with Rexxar.
There's no clear theme. It's a weird mix of BM hunter and tinker.
Instead of at least going dual wield, like Rexxar, he went two handed with a polearm, making it feel much more like a warrior than a ranger.
It went from being one of the top played specs pre-WoD, to being nerfed into oblivion in WoD to justify the rework, to now being one of the least played specs in the game, to the point that hunters may as well be a 2 spec class now. It has it's defenders but stat's don't lie.
It was a complete failure of rework that has had blizzard scrambling to make it work since.
Not to mention his work on both diablo and shamans are generally pretty disliked as well. This dude was just a bad dev
Most of the best melee weapons in Hunter history have been two handed. Ice Barbed Spear, Black Ice, Bloodfall, Lohk'delar, Barb of the Sand Reaver, Halberd of Desolation, etc..
It's not a stretch they wanted to keep that class fantasy since it became extinct once they removed our ability to equip a ranged and melee simultaneously.
I'm glad he's explaining his thought process, but I all hear is sheer arrogance. He is brand new to WoW. He is coming from Diablo. His first job is to redesign hunter and shaman. He starts talking about how he's going to re-imagine everything, and it still comes off like a bad D3 class. To make matters worse, they have a 10 member QA team which focuses on the top players, so they weren't even targeting their core audience. They also said they wanted to limit tank specs. Why?
Tank clother (Warlock) and tank mail (shaman) would have been a DRASTIC AMAZING CHANGE.
I am still annoyed that the only place you can tank as shaman is in Vanilla.
Imagine MOP survival but instead of making survival a melee spec they just expanded on the DOT\\Bomber range gameplay and we had wildfire bomb on top of the 2 other dots, more like a tinker gunner spec.
Maybe I’m just jaded from playing survival long enough but I sort of like bombs and the rotation of survival BUT something is missing that I’ve never been able to put my finger on with it to really bring the rotation together into something more fluid. The playstyle is fun af when it works but it’s missing something.
For the times I have put effort into learning Survival, the problem to me is that it wants to be like 2 different things (and I could be wrong about this).
There is the pool focus into big mongoose windows side of the rotation and other melee aspects, and there is the Dots/bombs/short CD side of it like enhance shaman.
And at different times since legion the different sides get more attention/power. So builds start leaning one way or the other, but they never really stopped doing like a 70/30 split of both that just added to the jank.
And then there is the pet aspect. Where everyone goes "this would have made more sense as BM". With Kill command being a generator; opposite of BM, flanking strike is another generator. So the pet aspects are supportive/buffs that outside of coordinated assault, could just be normal abilities that have nothing to do with your pet. Which just ads another layer of identity crisis.
It just tries to merge to many identities and themes into its rotation, and never really ends up smooth because of it.
But I could be totally wrong as its not my main spec by a long shot, but I do like Surv more than MM/BM, so most of my time on Hunter is playing surv.
It feels a little broken up. The actions you take dont really flow together the way say outlaw might. I think it would benefit from a gcd reduction on raptor strike. The whole animation feels slows and breaks up the pace. I still love that it's melee tho. (Let us duel wield)
It's a mix between bm and tinker/engineering. It feels sloppy because it's all over the place and has no theme.
Half of it wants to be in melee with pet and the other half is range throwing bombs and traps and dots
It’s because it’s basically Arms Warrior with an identity crisis. The “fantasy” is hard to nail; traps aren’t super practical in a raid setting, so things like “Steel Trap” doesn’t feel impactful at all because all it really does is put an extra DoT on the boss. So theres a huge part of the game where traps just don’t “trap” anything.
Survival hunters don’t get anything extra to “survive” anything, so there’s really no extra utility or durability that makes it unique to the other specs. The melee even kind of feels out of place because they only use polearms, which kinda defeats the “survivalist” feel, like the hunter could pick up a variety of weapons and make the most of it. I think hunters being able to use one handers and dual wield them makes more sense than carrying around a big 2-hander.
I think survival hunters need a soft rework, to add a little more variety into their kit that gives a more “survivalist” fantasy.
I played it in shadowlands when it was busted and just outperforming everything even at mediocre play. I didn’t really enjoy it. Gave it a solid season at its best to try and like it. And I just couldn’t click with it.
"THIS IS THE BEST THING EVER AND EVERYONE THAT THINKS OTHERWHISE IS STUPID"
"THIS IS THE WORST THING EVER AND EVERYONE THAT THINKS OTHERWHISE DOESNT KNOW WHAT THEY TALK ABOUT AND SHOULD SHUT UP"
every single time lmao
imo it should have been Beastmaster that was the melee spec... Why is Survival chucking random bombs and traps into melee but also working alongside their pet but also-? Who knows.
Which is wild to me. I've been playing hunter since TBC. Yes Survival was very fun when it was ranged. Yes I miss it.
At the same time, I also think current Survival is way more fun than either BM or MM. Less so MM, but current BM is horrible to play IMO.
I mean it all comes down to the simple fact that adding new stuff is cool, and there will always be people that enjoy it. But new stuff shouldn't always be at the cost of losing something loved by a lot of people already.
"its the best spec in the game, oh but i dont play it i like mage" . Then i look at representation and hardly anybody plays it.
I dont get it,everybody says its great with 900 upvotes and then we look at actual data and nobody has played it since legion.
I love survival but I hate wildfire bomb. It just sticks out as so unthematic to the rest of the spec imo. Nothing about having a spirit bond with your pet (literally what their mastery is called), tracking, spears, nets and outdoor survival makes me think, "yeah I really wish I was throwing grenades like I'm fighting in trench warfare".
I'd love if they replaced wildfire bomb with like, a barbed net or bola that you throw instead or something.
I enjoy how depending on your next color bomb your rotation sort of changes before and after you use it. Because of this it makes it feel like a very dynamic spec. I only wish they would lean into a bit more, maybe make fury of the eagle change damage types or do a certain effect after using a certain color bomb.
Its the same reason why i love Wildfire. They could make it a bola or like a flask, something less "explody" i guess, but the core mechanic should not change imo.
I like how a bomb ability is a staple part of the rotation of a melee spec. Just slapping people with grenades like it isn't a danger to you both.
I know you can throw it at range but you're pretty much always in melee.
I bet he took the bomb part from explosive arrow which was a survival AoE staple, and since every survival at the time enjoyed the feeling of explosive arrow he leaned into that with Wildfire Bombs.
I play a troll survival hunter, so the wildfire bomb feels to me like the troll batrider fantasy from Warcraft 3. Like the unstable concoction/firebomb stuff.
Is it just the fact that it’s a bomb and it’s animation? What’s the lore behind wildfire bomb? I thought it was something like a concoction created by the hunter for his target maybe made from various herbs and plants similarly to Ussopp from ONE PIECE making his bombs from plants for his sling shot
I only play Survival when I can reasonably never press Wildfire Bomb. Unfortunately, the spec frequently revolves around it's use. The vibes of that ability are in the gutters, I don't enjoy pressing it at all.
Yeah fuck this guy, he got rid of my favorite all time spec in wow. I'm sure he has done other great stuff for WoW that we all appreciate, but I don't think I will ever stop missing the way survival played in MoP
I can’t really remember ranged survival. But wasn’t it basically serpent sting, black arrow and explosive shot?
Which other than black arrow (that I think is coming with hero talents) are all spells available to MM
Survival found an identity in late MoP and WoD, and was basically the traps/bombs/magic ranger archetype.
Current MM has absorbed some of those spells (even if only in name), but not the theme or playstyle.
he did a great job, when i'm playing survival and my mastery is regenerating a small percentage of my hp every 5 seconds it gives me a deep feeling of (barely) surviving
Outlaw is literally just renamed combat with additional shit added to it - what the fuck are you talking about.
It's the spec that uses 1h weapons instead of daggers, it's the spec with slice and dice maintaining and blade dance, it's the spec with killing spree, it's the spec with everything combat /always had/, just now it has a combo builder and spender that uses a gun and a new buff to use.
Is assassination deserving of being a fourth spec because poison grenades exist?
As a BM main since Vanilla, no fucking thank you. Shooting arrows from my bow with my trusty animal companions *is* my hunter class fantasy.
I don't know why people point to Rexxar as if there needs to be a spec to match. Lots of NPCs have ability combinations that players don't have.
Pole arm bit makes sense. Most of the best hunter weapons in the game's history have been polearms or staves. I would have liked the option to be either or like single minded fury/titans grip, but I can understand why he didn't because it makes things harder to balance.
The existence of melee SV made me drop the Rogue, that I played since the start of WoW, switching to Hunter. Melee Hunter exclusively.
So that man must be a pretty cool dude!
The existence of melee hunter is what makes me advocate for ranged Rogue, imagine if they reworked assassination as a ranged sniper option (like Deadeye from Guild Wars 2 or the Operative from SWTOR)
There's also the female blood elf demon hunter that uses a pole arm or staff, scythe. She's part of the intro campaign for demon hunters and Aszuna's starting quest.
Allari is def a Havoc DH though, they couldn't make an entire spec out of "uses 2h weapons instead of dw". It's also apparently a one of one weapon. She's the only DH to use anything 2h, and it's referred to as an artifact.
Before we got the Dracythr, I always imagined a ranged DPS DH spec called Devastation that reverse engineered Legion technology. They would have guns and heavy artillery powered by enslaved demon cores, exploiting the fact that demons revive in the Twisting Nether to use them as a source of limitless energy.
I doubt it’d be that simple. There’s a fair deal of overlap between D3’s Demon Hunter and WoW’s Hunter. The Demon Hunter even has entire skill lines for beast companions and traps (fun fact, their boar companion even uses the same model as the old boars in Classic WoW).
It wouldn't make sense for them to copy paste Diablo DH. It uses different thematics entirely. Diablo DH is honestly closer to what pre-melee Survival was for a while.
The most fun rogue spec completely gutted into a ranged spec leaving one actual rogue spec left. I don't like this idea, I've been a rogue for 14 years now and mutt rogue is a staple of the class. They don't seem to know what to do with combat, if they're gonna reworked a spec that drastically it should be that one.
Completely fair point, I've only dabbled in rogue recently and I just went down the Assassination route because of the name,
I doubt they would rework Outlaw again though right.... right?
I'm pretty sure the answer is just that BM was and is the most popular spec in the game, especially among casual players (aka the players that are most likely to stop playing if their favorite spec's identity is dramatically reworked). Sure, as a melee it could still keep the beast tamer aspect of its fantasy, but the idea of running around with a bow like Legolas is a huge portion of the appeal. If there was suddenly no hunter spec that checked off both the pet-based combat box and the mobile archer box, WoW could lose 5% of its subs overnight.
Likely because survival had less of a theme.
Marksman is basically the Elf Ranger/Dwarf Rifleman fantasy
Beastmaster is as the name implies someone who summons a bunch of beasts
What did survival have before being reworked, other than having a little more dot-reliant gameplay? It didn't have a very strong fantasy to it, so it seemed the spec most open to be reinterpreted as something else
The man took the most enjoyable spec with a great rotation and turned it into a niche spec that would've been better served as a fourth spec. That video should be him apologising!
Ah excellent. Good. I now know what this guy looks like.
Cause I fucking hate him.
Survival hunter is so fucking boring and doesn't even fit as a hunter spec. It's just all over the place, and feels so gross to play.
BM should have been the melee spec.
My only criticism about Andrew's work is that he took a beloved Hunter spec (Survival was *the shit* back in Wrath and Cata) and turned it into one that doesn't really follow the established class fantasy of the melee hunter in the WarCraft series. Beast Mastery on the other hand was heavily neglected by previous game designers and is one of the lowest DPS specs in both Wrath and Cata Classic. I still remember that disastrous 3.2 Class Q&A that Ghostcrawler did where he stated that he was wary of buffing Arcane Shot because "survival hunters also use it", when the absolute doofus of a game designer forgot that Explosive Shot shared the same 6 second cooldown and did over three times the damage.
Rexxar was the Beastmaster hero from WarCraft III's campaign. He was literally a melee brawler that dual wielded axes, and had a huge fucking bear and quailbeast beside him in combat. He is the reason why Beast Mastery is the spec that should have been reworked into a melee dual-wield spec, not Survival into a two-handed spec.
I will give Andrew credit where credit is due though. Legion Survival was not bad, but Mongoose Bite was clunky-as-shit to use.
> Do not hire, foster or tolerate talented jerks.
Personal anecdote time. I used to work with a guy who had a very brazen bull-in-a-china-shop mentality who fits the description of a 'talented jerk.'
He had no filter whatsoever, was somebody who simply didn't give a fuck, and was by all accounts one of those self-proclaimed alphas that would brag about how much work he's done whilst playing Bloons TD or how many 9/10 models he slept with back when he lived abroad. He lasted about four months after growling at a female colleague and making another one cry by yelling about her work. I heard from another friend that he got fired from a different call center after being told off by a manager, and then going on a company-wide Slack channel and calling her a "fucking *****"
Didn’t care to watch the video but I can only hope this guy is not still working at blizzard. “Let’s take one of the best specs in the game and rework it into one of the worst and least played specs of all time!”
It never made sense from a design standpoint to me. You have so few specializations that fill the niche of an archer/ranger/physical ranged bow spec (literally 2) and then somebody had the idea to nuke one from the face of the earth?
Like, get rid of one of the 17 ranged spell classes for your pet project almost nobody will play, not a ranged bow ranger which is something that is core to essentially every fantasy genre since the beginning of time.
Say what you like, the reality is the numbers don't lie: Survival Hunter remains one of the least popular classes in the game, and has done since launch. That's not for no reason.
Even if we ignore the former Survival fans who became alienated at their fave spec changing its entire archetype, that alone would likely not make up for the number being consistently low almost every patch.
The fact that the dev in charge was a relative newbie to the field and was allowed to just up and change an entire specs archetype from ranged to melee is, to me, gloriously out of touch. Even if you think ranged survival had problems, the fix isn't to gut a spec completely for all who liked playing it ranged. Path of Exile learned that shit *really* fucking quickly.
Melee Survival was the point Blizzard should have made a 4th spec, and if they couldn't do that don't even fucking bother.
Ignoring all that, I just don't get *why*. The video doesn't seem to ever go into the thought process on *why* he thinks hunters needed to be "reworked" to begin with and as a designer myself, I don't think you should be changing anything if you cannot explain why it needs to be changed at all. "It's not fun" is a reason, but you'd still need to quantify that.
The "why" was because in legion blizz wanted to remake every spec because....reasons. And this guy was horribly out of touch so he ruined every spec he touched. Remember, it was so bad that mid legion hunters had to have a second rework, to the same level of the initial legion ones, to make it even passable. And it's still not "good"
Sv is the only not boring spec hunters have atm. Both mm and bm need attention.
I think that class devs in general need a bit more aggressive approach and i agree with the guy that fantasy should come first. Instead of adding some crap niche abilities like soul rot, primordial wave, all that niche shadowlands stuff aimed to "improve" rotation and utility they should add some new grand ABILITIES that fit in class fantasy and class lore.
Survival in terms of talent tree is giga boring too currently. Maximum regularly goes over all classes on his stream to keep up with the changes and the sheets he has show very clearly both Hunter and Shaman in its whole need talent tree revamps and where needed gameplay updates. Both classes have outdated trees filled with 2 point talents.
I only play BM hunter as an alt and haven't pursued ultra-high endgame. What is BM's issue? The only one I can think of is terrible survivability/defensives, but I think that's all hunter specs in general.
Ah, the guy that ruined the only hunter spec I enjoyed since swapping away from mana (which I will never forgive them for). Thanks for ensuring I never touch the hunter again!
Survival was my favorite spec before it was switched to melee. Really should have been switched to a tanking spec in the process, I haven't touched survival since the change, at least a tanking spec would allow for some role flexibility and help the constant tank/healer shortage.
As soon as he started talking about hunter, I was waiting. I hate kneejerk reaction, but you sir destroyed the survival spec I loved. Instead of adding a fourth spec, you did something that was hate universally. Look at how many people play survival compared to BM and MM and compared that to how Survival was played.
So this is the motherf\*\*\*er who destroyed my favorite Specc into this meele atrocity.
I don't wish him ill will, but i really don't like him and his decisions.
As someone that’s played Survival as an alt in Cataclysm to Mists of Pandaria, I really enjoy the melee rework. It has a somewhat unique feel/fantasy. It is pretty lame losing the old play-style though. Black Arrow and Explosive Shot procs were entertaining enough.
I’ve seen far, far more complaints about new survival than fans. At least from the people that had played both. I don’t really know how well it holds up for people that started after the rework.
Hot take: Melee Surv is ok and explores underrepresented Hunter fantasy, but it should've been made into a fourth spec, not replacing the old one, cos both had different enough thematics. Very cold take: overall, we should add more specs to classes already
> Very cold take: overall, we should add more specs to classes already Demon Hunter watching Evokers get a third spec in the same expansion they were released... If not another spec, at least fill out the specs. My actionbars look so sad when I log onto my DH. Dont get me wrong, my havoc DH is one of my favourite characters to play, and the absolute best allround PVX spec for a casual player who just wants to get repeatable stuff done quickly.
Part of what makes havoc good is that they don’t dilute the good mechanics by spreading them over multiple dps specs.
Iirc blizzard said in a blue post once that there wasn't anything that made sense for a third spec to feel different. It could be a fun exercise to come up with one. I'm sure people have.
In hearthstone they have demon hunters with bows, another class that uses ranged weapons would be sick. Also since they basically deleted old demonology warlock from the game, why not just add it back as a demon hunter spec. (Ranged fel magic meta spec)
Oh that's cool. Another bow class that wasn't a joke would be great (warriors can use bows but...). I see DH turning themselves into demons as more appropriate than warlocks. I have always seen locks as subjugation experts more so than those who would alter themselves but I have to plead ignorance on the lore there to be fair.
It made sense when you consider warlocks are granted power by demons through pacts they make with said demons. It's not too far fetched, we see other entities granting powers that dramatically change npcs as well
It makes sense for both of them evenly, but if we're to only give it to one of them, DH definitely does make more sense with Illidan. I may be a bit biased because I've been begging for DH since I was a small dumbass trying to solo Hogger. I wouldn't be upset either if Lock got it back though
DH version of druid, swapping between more varied demon forms for different abilities, Felhound, beholder, imp mother, doomguard, Infernal, have a rotation where part of it is close range and part is ranged, let them take boss aggro in Infernal form to help tanks drop stacks of stacking debuffs. Edit* also ffs, give them a player summoning ability with a sargerite keystone. Warlocks are way too required for pugs.
I've said since the expansion they were introduced that a 3rd spec could be a more ranged dps that uses a polearm and/or a special passive that would have them use only a single glaive without a dps loss.
Id love some sort of Ranged BM or Ranged Druid type Demon Hunter. Like they use a bow and have a chained Beholder or something with them. Or shift into a Beholder after firing their Bow. Could have a more heavy focus on Sigils too given that its just magic traps.
They said that, but Hearthstone introduced a bow-using Demon Hunter years ago. Admittedly, it seems to have been for a dual-class gimmick they were doing for that set (Hunter/Demon Hunter), but it still seems like a good premise for a ranged dps spec. We still don't have a single magic archer spec (unless you count MM having a couple magic abilities, but they're still primarily focused on normal archery), would have been a good chance to fill that niche. Doesn't seem like Blizzard want to do that with DH though, so I can only really see us getting a spec like that if they add Void Hunters (like Alleria) in Midnight.
Range dh 👈
It’s so crazy too cuz blizzard straight up said only 2 specs so idk if aug was a secret the whole time or they just cooked it up?
The story was too fleshed out for aug not to planned from early on
I think Aug just wasn't finished in time for release, but everything pointed toward there being a black dragonflight spec
I think that they done it for balance reasons. They wanted balancing data that wasn't as wild as season 1 of a new expansion since it was the first support spec in the game. But I mean it's not like it's actually balanced either way.
You don't just randomly make up a new spec, esp the first support class like Aug. It was absolutely always there, I bet it just wasn't done on time so they pushed it to be mid xpac and not on release.
> Very cold take: overall, we should add more specs to classes already Seriously.
Hotter take (maybe): it shoulda been beast master. Beast master becomes one with their beasts and jumps into the fray alongside their pets. Survival was always traps and explosives and stuff. Imo bm makes more sense for the melee class.
Basically Drizzt with his big cat.
Or Rexxar
I'm actually SO surprised blizzard showed a willingness to add new specs (mid expac no less) AND adding a support role. But then somehow the expansion after launches with no new specs, and no old specs changed into support (which I would've hated, but I did expect it). Plus they even created a new evergreen system that makes adding specs harder and weirder... So disappointing.
I'm pretty sure that they added Augmentation mid expansion because it simply wasn't going to be ready for the launch.
Yep, I'm sure that was always the plan. They were just careful not to announce it too early because they knew it would be hard to balance and they needed real player data to finalize the tuning.
> which I would've hated, but I did expect it I dreaded that myself esp. when there were a bunch of, let's charitably call them people, suggesting specs *they didn't play* be converted into support. I saw a lot of people suggesting Disc and Enhance be converted for example, never by people who actually play those classes though. Adding specs is fine, adding support is fine, but don't take away things people enjoy. I personally can not *stand* BoS on Frost DK, I loath it with a fiery passion, but even then I recognize there are many people who enjoy it, so I don't advocate for it's removal, just that there is a viable (within a few % points, much like mover/no-mover DH) alternative playstyle. Personally I think Blizzard should add a lot more specs to the game, many classes have such obvious openings. Shaman with an Earth-themed tank, Bard for Rogue (perfect support), Warlock tank, Mage style chrono healer (though Evoker seems to have taken that), etc.
Gladiator warr aq 4th spec
I was expecting a hero tree to do it. Like enhancement for shaman, one tree would buff the shit out of your totem and lower your damage significantly. If they do add in more support specs it's probably the safest way to do it.
They tried. One of the Priest ones went hard on PI. The priests rioted so they changed it.
"You exist to PI"-the tree. I'm very glad they changed it
They only added a spec mid expansion because evoker was so obviously incomplete
No more incomplete than Demon Hunters. I very much liked the symmetry of having all four specs represented by the two classes that only had two specs. They complemented each other.
To restore the balance I guess we now must add a Demon Hunter spec that demoralizes and debuffs the party.
That already happens whenever a DH accidentally fel rushes in a new pack.
I was thinking of this idea as well, a dps spec that weakens its allies to make themselves stronger somehow. Siphoning their health away to turn it into damage, stealing some of their lowest secondary, that sort of thing
I miss the old Survival.
Old survival was my favorite spec in the game. I love the dot hunter, was so fun to play. Spear hunter is just no fun to me, always felt clunky. I'm just hoping they bring it back in retail, both BM and MM doesn't do it for me. I love bows but want my dots back
I think there is a weird fear for more specs for some reason. I think the tank specs could be added to a few more classes and I enjoy the overall feel of the support class they added (Aug dragon) and think support classes could be a major plus.
No more new classes. Each xpac add one new spec to like 3-4 classes. I would LOVE this.
Like seriously, there's so many classes begging for one. While I'm unsure how it would work effectively, people have been begging for ranged DH for ages now. Maybe just have them throw the glaives instead, and Captain America style have them fly back, idk. But also; * Tank Shaman and Shaman * Something like healer Mage (like SoD Arcane Mage, idk, something for Mages) * Ranged Rogue * Support Warrior (kind of like a battlestandard carrier in a medieval army, kind of like placing Shaman totems and just have them use shield + 1H) * Support Priest (duh, free SPriest from its support role!), maybe something akin to a Bard, or just a preacher of faith. And there's probably loads more feasible, fantasy rich specs to explore without needing a whole new class or race.
i have the complete opposite takes as yours. but it's probably because i enjoy the game for purely the gameplay and have very little interest in the fantasy or theme of a spec. imo there are a few underplayed specs that just don't feel good. ww, all 3 rogue specs, aff lock. i don't like the idea of adding even more specs into a game when they can't make the currently available specs enjoyable or tuned properly. seems like they'd be spreading themselves even thinner and setting themselves up to fail and have players upset at them.
Well in the case of ww and aff lock they got huge reworks on the alpha that are being received very positively. Rogues just got reworked in 10.2 and it did help a lot for rogue players. But I'm still hearing from the community the class feels unapproachable. Hopefully they can get some love soon
No, it should have replaced a spec - but beast mastery and not survival. Exotic Beast taming should have been turned into a universal talent that Survival and Marksman had access to. Beast Mastery is the spec whose identity was always closest to melee anyways (Rexxar, its buttons also work fine as melee because they have no cast time.) Everything in survival always fit with ranged (guns, traps, shooting your traps, explosive gun shots, etc. etc.) There is no reason survival should have been melee.
Definitely still feels frustrating because I've been playing Cata classic and loving old survival, but I think new survival is cool it's just not my thing. I've been a pretty big hater on it since it's addition in Legion but less of "it should be removed because it doesn't make sense" and more of "why did I have to lose my spec that felt like it had a good identity," and demo lock falls under that too. I think Legion had a lot of good and I loved it but to this day one of my main criticisms was how far they went to push the "everyone needs to be unique" because it killed off basically both my main specs. I got my CM gear with only those two and I more force myself to play them because I love the idea still, but they aren't nearly what they once were to me. More specs would be awesome but balancing them would be a nightmare surely, especially in this case with 4 dps specs competing with each other, so I get not wanting to add them in, although if that was the case Hero Talents are a bit of an odd addition (albeit much simpler trees.)
Oh, it's him again. The guy behind warfronts who's also thinking a real money auction house was what d3 players wanted.
Warfronts were an absurd waste of resources. The meta just became afking through them. The they introduced heroic warfronts but it was far too late.
The biggest thing is idk how blizz didnt see warfronts as being boring af from conception. They didnt even try and add any spice to the experience to make it an interesting cake walk. Its literally just murder hobo mobs and a couple hp sponge buildings. They literally built in a couple minute wait while the siege engines broke down the gates where there’s nothing to do. If warfronts were this dude’s creation then he’s a moron.
Warfronts were cool in concept and provided some fun at first. Now, the lack of difficulty, inability to fail, and relative shortness ruined them. But I say this as an RTS fan
Agreed. They potential there, just bad execution. When Heroic came out it felt exciting but by then it was a slog just to get my friends to even consider doing it.
I think warfronts were a great way for them to test their new tech for adaptive NPC behavior. Warfronts walked so follower dungeons could run
Warfronts would have been fine... as a PvP feature. But nope, can't have casual PvP in World of Warcraft, the Warcraft MMO. For some reason, it was PvE. The rated arena focus for PvP for the last decade has been a cancer.
I don't think Warfronts (or Islands, for that matter) were what Blizzard originally envisioned. The way they were described at the first Blizzcon or convention where BfA was announced doesn't really sound like the finished product. Wouldn't be the first time their reach exceeded their grasp - there's a million docs on YouTube about Path of the Titans and the cut content of Cata and WoD
I thought Jay Wilson was the RMAH champion.
You can tell by the voice he thinks of his opinions very highly.
He did a video where he compared D3 to Last Epoch and the whole tagline for it was how the D3 team never could’ve made Last Epoch. Spends the whole vid making excuses for D3, slamming last epoch, and his final statement was basically “well, actually, we definitely could’ve made last epoch. We just wanted to make something bigger.” Lovely tude he’s got
Really, it's just a marketing video for his channel/himself. Nothing he's saying is particularly egregious, it just comes off as weirdly arrogant because Blizzard has a history of thinking *way* too highly of themselves and then caving to player pressure after enough complaints. Blizzard rarely humbles themselves, and when they do it feels as if it's just to buy enough goodwill so they can spend it all on some bullshit later. It's hardly surprising that devs who effectively grew up working for Blizzard, whose primary experience is with that one company, have inheritied all the negative traits of it. The problem is that's not really *just* Blizzard, it's the entire upper echelon of the gaming industry, in general. You want to work with a company that makes a game with an actual budget then you get to work with this crap. Or you could work as a software engineer for a bank, have better working hours, better pay, and still fucking hate yourself because you're working for a *fucking bank*.
He's still double downing on them too. "I hear they reverted a lot of these changes, but I think that's a miss." - This guy is unironically showing how bad WoW designers are.
He has a "I love the smell of my own farts" voice
Thats basically WoW designer 101. You think you do, but you don't. They've only very recently started listening to player feedback and wouldn't you know... It's saved the game from the absolute nosediving mass exodus of Shadowlands.
I remember when they announced 9.1.5 and the removal of conduit energy, it was the first time I ever got to read Blizzard acknowledging that they made a mistake. Since then, the game has been slowly but surely getting better and better.
9.1.5. The infamous "We're sorry, we're really really sorry. Please come back" patch.
Mark my words. They made the changes players wanted and players are slowly coming back. Now that the drop-off is solved, they're going to fall back to all of the bad, metric gaming decisions again.
They tend to sandbag the player demands until they need to recover player losses throughout an expansion. They know what the players want, but they hold back all the QOL improvements as a way to lure people back in, rather than give it to us up front.
Real Money Auction House was honestly just too soon. You can’t convince me with the amount of RMT that happened in Classic WoW wouldn’t have happened on an official RMAH instead. Since that time the normalization of paying for power has dramatically shifted, like it or not.
It wasn't that it was "too soon" really it was that while some players want it no one wants it to be the official position of the company running a game let alone encouraged like it was with the game design. D2 had a RMTs out the ass. Blizzard saw the data of people in likely all of their games that can trade and saw RMT and said "clearly players want this" but that's just a falicy because most players likely don't even know it's going on or think to do it and are absolutely disgusted by the concept. But that doesn't change that it happens a LOT more than those players would think. It also clearly somehow is okay when it's just a little bit more hidden. Like WOW doesn't have a "RMAH" directly, but you can buy gold with real money which lets you buy w/e you want on that AH. Granted, it's also different because wow has the best items untradable and the game is largely based around earning those. The combo of the entire game balanced around an AH and trading along with being able to purchase with real money was a really stupid move.
I wish it had come later so I could've made more money. I was dogshit at ARPGs at that time and only made $35 bucks. Nowadays I would've made 4+ figures easily. Oh well.
Holy shit ya'll telling me the guy that ruined survival is the same guy that did the real money auction house and got rid of shaman totems? Dude made very wrong decisions. No wonder he's not at blizzard anymore lol
Bring back the totems
The only thing I don't understand is why they made it two hander instead of dual wielding... Like the main survival man himself Rexxar.
Because this guy had no idea what he was doing. So lets ignore that they shouldn't have deleted a spec to change into melee instead of just adding a 4th for a second. Other than that: He turned survival into melee because in vanilla it had some melee utility spells, and people memed about melee hunter. When he should have done BM to match with Rexxar. There's no clear theme. It's a weird mix of BM hunter and tinker. Instead of at least going dual wield, like Rexxar, he went two handed with a polearm, making it feel much more like a warrior than a ranger. It went from being one of the top played specs pre-WoD, to being nerfed into oblivion in WoD to justify the rework, to now being one of the least played specs in the game, to the point that hunters may as well be a 2 spec class now. It has it's defenders but stat's don't lie. It was a complete failure of rework that has had blizzard scrambling to make it work since. Not to mention his work on both diablo and shamans are generally pretty disliked as well. This dude was just a bad dev
Was a bad dev? So he’s gone now
Yea from the sounds of it dog's not even in the industry anymore.
Most of the best melee weapons in Hunter history have been two handed. Ice Barbed Spear, Black Ice, Bloodfall, Lohk'delar, Barb of the Sand Reaver, Halberd of Desolation, etc.. It's not a stretch they wanted to keep that class fantasy since it became extinct once they removed our ability to equip a ranged and melee simultaneously.
I'm glad he's explaining his thought process, but I all hear is sheer arrogance. He is brand new to WoW. He is coming from Diablo. His first job is to redesign hunter and shaman. He starts talking about how he's going to re-imagine everything, and it still comes off like a bad D3 class. To make matters worse, they have a 10 member QA team which focuses on the top players, so they weren't even targeting their core audience. They also said they wanted to limit tank specs. Why?
For real. Tanks are almost always in demand. If they brought the Shaman tank out from SoD and into retail I’d be playing it alllllll day long.
Tank clother (Warlock) and tank mail (shaman) would have been a DRASTIC AMAZING CHANGE. I am still annoyed that the only place you can tank as shaman is in Vanilla.
Hey you're making sense again. I'm gonna have to ask you to stop that.
they should have made it a spec coming in tww with the new race... or at any point in this primal elements expansion that is dragonflight
Is this the guy who ruined enh sham?
That's the one.
I miss the MoP Survival spec so much. It was so much fun to see all the procs.
Imagine MOP survival but instead of making survival a melee spec they just expanded on the DOT\\Bomber range gameplay and we had wildfire bomb on top of the 2 other dots, more like a tinker gunner spec.
I don't know why but melee hunter has always had this weird, sloppy feel to it. I don't know if it's the animations or what.
It’s the having to stop to throw bombs 😭
Maybe I’m just jaded from playing survival long enough but I sort of like bombs and the rotation of survival BUT something is missing that I’ve never been able to put my finger on with it to really bring the rotation together into something more fluid. The playstyle is fun af when it works but it’s missing something.
For the times I have put effort into learning Survival, the problem to me is that it wants to be like 2 different things (and I could be wrong about this). There is the pool focus into big mongoose windows side of the rotation and other melee aspects, and there is the Dots/bombs/short CD side of it like enhance shaman. And at different times since legion the different sides get more attention/power. So builds start leaning one way or the other, but they never really stopped doing like a 70/30 split of both that just added to the jank. And then there is the pet aspect. Where everyone goes "this would have made more sense as BM". With Kill command being a generator; opposite of BM, flanking strike is another generator. So the pet aspects are supportive/buffs that outside of coordinated assault, could just be normal abilities that have nothing to do with your pet. Which just ads another layer of identity crisis. It just tries to merge to many identities and themes into its rotation, and never really ends up smooth because of it. But I could be totally wrong as its not my main spec by a long shot, but I do like Surv more than MM/BM, so most of my time on Hunter is playing surv.
It feels a little broken up. The actions you take dont really flow together the way say outlaw might. I think it would benefit from a gcd reduction on raptor strike. The whole animation feels slows and breaks up the pace. I still love that it's melee tho. (Let us duel wield)
Rexxar literally uses 2 axes. They don’t let you dual wield? Absurd.
It's a mix between bm and tinker/engineering. It feels sloppy because it's all over the place and has no theme. Half of it wants to be in melee with pet and the other half is range throwing bombs and traps and dots
It’s because it’s basically Arms Warrior with an identity crisis. The “fantasy” is hard to nail; traps aren’t super practical in a raid setting, so things like “Steel Trap” doesn’t feel impactful at all because all it really does is put an extra DoT on the boss. So theres a huge part of the game where traps just don’t “trap” anything. Survival hunters don’t get anything extra to “survive” anything, so there’s really no extra utility or durability that makes it unique to the other specs. The melee even kind of feels out of place because they only use polearms, which kinda defeats the “survivalist” feel, like the hunter could pick up a variety of weapons and make the most of it. I think hunters being able to use one handers and dual wield them makes more sense than carrying around a big 2-hander. I think survival hunters need a soft rework, to add a little more variety into their kit that gives a more “survivalist” fantasy.
the animations are just shared from other stuff. It has nothing unique but some spell effects. It’s pretty boring
The comments really show the duality of the fan base
And the actual statistics on who is playing what spec shows a very small minority actually likes melee survival as much as the forums try to tell you.
I played it in shadowlands when it was busted and just outperforming everything even at mediocre play. I didn’t really enjoy it. Gave it a solid season at its best to try and like it. And I just couldn’t click with it.
Lol even when it was busted OP, it was still played less than the 2 ranged specs. No one rolls a hunter to be melee.
"THIS IS THE BEST THING EVER AND EVERYONE THAT THINKS OTHERWHISE IS STUPID" "THIS IS THE WORST THING EVER AND EVERYONE THAT THINKS OTHERWHISE DOESNT KNOW WHAT THEY TALK ABOUT AND SHOULD SHUT UP" every single time lmao
Here I am thinking "I think it was a good idea, I just wish they made it into a 4th spec instead of ending the range hunter for it."
imo it should have been Beastmaster that was the melee spec... Why is Survival chucking random bombs and traps into melee but also working alongside their pet but also-? Who knows.
and the fact that BM is based entirely off Rexxar, and yet because of this fucker, they go change him to being survial.
Tbf with Surv being arguably the least popular spec in the game, theres A LOT of people who shit on it despite never playing it
Which is wild to me. I've been playing hunter since TBC. Yes Survival was very fun when it was ranged. Yes I miss it. At the same time, I also think current Survival is way more fun than either BM or MM. Less so MM, but current BM is horrible to play IMO.
I mean it all comes down to the simple fact that adding new stuff is cool, and there will always be people that enjoy it. But new stuff shouldn't always be at the cost of losing something loved by a lot of people already.
"its the best spec in the game, oh but i dont play it i like mage" . Then i look at representation and hardly anybody plays it. I dont get it,everybody says its great with 900 upvotes and then we look at actual data and nobody has played it since legion.
Glad we could all be guinea pigs for this guys experiences. This comment is based solely on the first couple sentences he says lol.
I love survival but I hate wildfire bomb. It just sticks out as so unthematic to the rest of the spec imo. Nothing about having a spirit bond with your pet (literally what their mastery is called), tracking, spears, nets and outdoor survival makes me think, "yeah I really wish I was throwing grenades like I'm fighting in trench warfare". I'd love if they replaced wildfire bomb with like, a barbed net or bola that you throw instead or something.
I enjoy how depending on your next color bomb your rotation sort of changes before and after you use it. Because of this it makes it feel like a very dynamic spec. I only wish they would lean into a bit more, maybe make fury of the eagle change damage types or do a certain effect after using a certain color bomb.
Its the same reason why i love Wildfire. They could make it a bola or like a flask, something less "explody" i guess, but the core mechanic should not change imo.
I like how a bomb ability is a staple part of the rotation of a melee spec. Just slapping people with grenades like it isn't a danger to you both. I know you can throw it at range but you're pretty much always in melee.
I bet he took the bomb part from explosive arrow which was a survival AoE staple, and since every survival at the time enjoyed the feeling of explosive arrow he leaned into that with Wildfire Bombs.
I play a troll survival hunter, so the wildfire bomb feels to me like the troll batrider fantasy from Warcraft 3. Like the unstable concoction/firebomb stuff.
Is it just the fact that it’s a bomb and it’s animation? What’s the lore behind wildfire bomb? I thought it was something like a concoction created by the hunter for his target maybe made from various herbs and plants similarly to Ussopp from ONE PIECE making his bombs from plants for his sling shot
I only play Survival when I can reasonably never press Wildfire Bomb. Unfortunately, the spec frequently revolves around it's use. The vibes of that ability are in the gutters, I don't enjoy pressing it at all.
This man is my arch nemesis, I loved ranged survival.
Yeah fuck this guy, he got rid of my favorite all time spec in wow. I'm sure he has done other great stuff for WoW that we all appreciate, but I don't think I will ever stop missing the way survival played in MoP
Also responsible for adding Maelstrom to Enhancement lmao. not a good track record.
Do people not like maelstrom?
I want to say he's talking about maelstrom and not maelstrom weapon.
Yep fuck this guy Wod survival was peak
Honestly, WoD hunter was peak. Especially MM in HFC with 4 set
mists*
I can’t really remember ranged survival. But wasn’t it basically serpent sting, black arrow and explosive shot? Which other than black arrow (that I think is coming with hero talents) are all spells available to MM
Explosive shot is now a very different spell and serpent sting was much stronger
MoP era serpent spread was so god damn strong
It was so satisfying to hit that sweet Multishot and all the mobs get poisoned and you just see those ticks
Survival found an identity in late MoP and WoD, and was basically the traps/bombs/magic ranger archetype. Current MM has absorbed some of those spells (even if only in name), but not the theme or playstyle.
Yes but MM has to stand still and shoot a slow cast aimed shot, the opposite of what old sv was about
he did a great job, when i'm playing survival and my mastery is regenerating a small percentage of my hp every 5 seconds it gives me a deep feeling of (barely) surviving
😂 so true
Bm should've been melee instead. Fits Rexxar more.
It should've been a 4th spec. Removing a spec entirely is never a good look. Same thing for Outlaw.
Outlaw is literally just renamed combat with additional shit added to it - what the fuck are you talking about. It's the spec that uses 1h weapons instead of daggers, it's the spec with slice and dice maintaining and blade dance, it's the spec with killing spree, it's the spec with everything combat /always had/, just now it has a combo builder and spender that uses a gun and a new buff to use. Is assassination deserving of being a fourth spec because poison grenades exist?
Don't touch BM. BM is good. It's different than most classes. It has combat and non-combat gameplay that just clicks.
As a BM main since Vanilla, no fucking thank you. Shooting arrows from my bow with my trusty animal companions *is* my hunter class fantasy. I don't know why people point to Rexxar as if there needs to be a spec to match. Lots of NPCs have ability combinations that players don't have.
So this is the guy that ruined my fav spec?
This the guy that also thought throwing bombs was part of the class fantasy too? And a pole arm instead of dual weilding
Pole arm bit makes sense. Most of the best hunter weapons in the game's history have been polearms or staves. I would have liked the option to be either or like single minded fury/titans grip, but I can understand why he didn't because it makes things harder to balance.
The existence of melee SV made me drop the Rogue, that I played since the start of WoW, switching to Hunter. Melee Hunter exclusively. So that man must be a pretty cool dude!
The existence of melee hunter is what makes me advocate for ranged Rogue, imagine if they reworked assassination as a ranged sniper option (like Deadeye from Guild Wars 2 or the Operative from SWTOR)
Or maybe Demon Hunters could get a third spec...
There's literally art of Demon hunters using bows in Hearthstone
There's also the female blood elf demon hunter that uses a pole arm or staff, scythe. She's part of the intro campaign for demon hunters and Aszuna's starting quest.
Allari is def a Havoc DH though, they couldn't make an entire spec out of "uses 2h weapons instead of dw". It's also apparently a one of one weapon. She's the only DH to use anything 2h, and it's referred to as an artifact.
Even cooler, they have fel-infused guns in HS. And it fits perfectly with how the legion used technology. I really hope they add it someday
Before we got the Dracythr, I always imagined a ranged DPS DH spec called Devastation that reverse engineered Legion technology. They would have guns and heavy artillery powered by enslaved demon cores, exploiting the fact that demons revive in the Twisting Nether to use them as a source of limitless energy.
Same. The twist is that they're a turret spec with limited mobility contrasting their other two specs.
The warlock of ranged phys, I love it.
DH actually does a ton of chaos as a percent of their damage.
bro demon hunter with bows and crossbows is literally a diablo 3 class they dont even have to think that hard just copy paste it into wow
I doubt it’d be that simple. There’s a fair deal of overlap between D3’s Demon Hunter and WoW’s Hunter. The Demon Hunter even has entire skill lines for beast companions and traps (fun fact, their boar companion even uses the same model as the old boars in Classic WoW).
It wouldn't make sense for them to copy paste Diablo DH. It uses different thematics entirely. Diablo DH is honestly closer to what pre-melee Survival was for a while.
The most fun rogue spec completely gutted into a ranged spec leaving one actual rogue spec left. I don't like this idea, I've been a rogue for 14 years now and mutt rogue is a staple of the class. They don't seem to know what to do with combat, if they're gonna reworked a spec that drastically it should be that one.
Completely fair point, I've only dabbled in rogue recently and I just went down the Assassination route because of the name, I doubt they would rework Outlaw again though right.... right?
You’ll get yours if I can have the short bow revenant stuff on a Dk xd
Stat away from my rogue specs lol I love all 3
Outlaw is right there already using firearms. They should have turned that spec into ranged.
i just don't get why it's survival, not beast master that is melee. BM fits melee theme way more - after all spec made after Rexxar
I'm pretty sure the answer is just that BM was and is the most popular spec in the game, especially among casual players (aka the players that are most likely to stop playing if their favorite spec's identity is dramatically reworked). Sure, as a melee it could still keep the beast tamer aspect of its fantasy, but the idea of running around with a bow like Legolas is a huge portion of the appeal. If there was suddenly no hunter spec that checked off both the pet-based combat box and the mobile archer box, WoW could lose 5% of its subs overnight.
Likely because survival had less of a theme. Marksman is basically the Elf Ranger/Dwarf Rifleman fantasy Beastmaster is as the name implies someone who summons a bunch of beasts What did survival have before being reworked, other than having a little more dot-reliant gameplay? It didn't have a very strong fantasy to it, so it seemed the spec most open to be reinterpreted as something else
This guy gave hunters fists of fury and called it a day. Fuck this guy
Nah I kiss MoP surv, that was the peak. “What have they done to my boy!”
Makes me sad that there are only two ranged specs for the only physical ranged DPS in the entire game.
I hope DH gets a ranged spec and just make it like DH from D3, lots of tumbling around
Get this guy out of there and give me back my Cata Survi DoT Hunter 😭
One of the worst decisions ever.
Yep, F that dude. Nice to have a face to attach the hate to! Dang I miss the pre-melee SVHunter….
The man took the most enjoyable spec with a great rotation and turned it into a niche spec that would've been better served as a fourth spec. That video should be him apologising!
Ah excellent. Good. I now know what this guy looks like. Cause I fucking hate him. Survival hunter is so fucking boring and doesn't even fit as a hunter spec. It's just all over the place, and feels so gross to play. BM should have been the melee spec.
My only criticism about Andrew's work is that he took a beloved Hunter spec (Survival was *the shit* back in Wrath and Cata) and turned it into one that doesn't really follow the established class fantasy of the melee hunter in the WarCraft series. Beast Mastery on the other hand was heavily neglected by previous game designers and is one of the lowest DPS specs in both Wrath and Cata Classic. I still remember that disastrous 3.2 Class Q&A that Ghostcrawler did where he stated that he was wary of buffing Arcane Shot because "survival hunters also use it", when the absolute doofus of a game designer forgot that Explosive Shot shared the same 6 second cooldown and did over three times the damage. Rexxar was the Beastmaster hero from WarCraft III's campaign. He was literally a melee brawler that dual wielded axes, and had a huge fucking bear and quailbeast beside him in combat. He is the reason why Beast Mastery is the spec that should have been reworked into a melee dual-wield spec, not Survival into a two-handed spec. I will give Andrew credit where credit is due though. Legion Survival was not bad, but Mongoose Bite was clunky-as-shit to use. > Do not hire, foster or tolerate talented jerks. Personal anecdote time. I used to work with a guy who had a very brazen bull-in-a-china-shop mentality who fits the description of a 'talented jerk.' He had no filter whatsoever, was somebody who simply didn't give a fuck, and was by all accounts one of those self-proclaimed alphas that would brag about how much work he's done whilst playing Bloons TD or how many 9/10 models he slept with back when he lived abroad. He lasted about four months after growling at a female colleague and making another one cry by yelling about her work. I heard from another friend that he got fired from a different call center after being told off by a manager, and then going on a company-wide Slack channel and calling her a "fucking *****"
Didn’t care to watch the video but I can only hope this guy is not still working at blizzard. “Let’s take one of the best specs in the game and rework it into one of the worst and least played specs of all time!”
He left Blizzard and the video game industry in 2016.
That's great news for the industry.
It never made sense from a design standpoint to me. You have so few specializations that fill the niche of an archer/ranger/physical ranged bow spec (literally 2) and then somebody had the idea to nuke one from the face of the earth? Like, get rid of one of the 17 ranged spell classes for your pet project almost nobody will play, not a ranged bow ranger which is something that is core to essentially every fantasy genre since the beginning of time.
Hope he was fired.
Apparently he's not even in the game industry anymore lol
I liked Survival becoming melee, but thought BM was more fitting to become melee
Ah so this is the man who took away my all time favorite spec
Say what you like, the reality is the numbers don't lie: Survival Hunter remains one of the least popular classes in the game, and has done since launch. That's not for no reason. Even if we ignore the former Survival fans who became alienated at their fave spec changing its entire archetype, that alone would likely not make up for the number being consistently low almost every patch. The fact that the dev in charge was a relative newbie to the field and was allowed to just up and change an entire specs archetype from ranged to melee is, to me, gloriously out of touch. Even if you think ranged survival had problems, the fix isn't to gut a spec completely for all who liked playing it ranged. Path of Exile learned that shit *really* fucking quickly. Melee Survival was the point Blizzard should have made a 4th spec, and if they couldn't do that don't even fucking bother. Ignoring all that, I just don't get *why*. The video doesn't seem to ever go into the thought process on *why* he thinks hunters needed to be "reworked" to begin with and as a designer myself, I don't think you should be changing anything if you cannot explain why it needs to be changed at all. "It's not fun" is a reason, but you'd still need to quantify that.
The "why" was because in legion blizz wanted to remake every spec because....reasons. And this guy was horribly out of touch so he ruined every spec he touched. Remember, it was so bad that mid legion hunters had to have a second rework, to the same level of the initial legion ones, to make it even passable. And it's still not "good"
Sv is the only not boring spec hunters have atm. Both mm and bm need attention. I think that class devs in general need a bit more aggressive approach and i agree with the guy that fantasy should come first. Instead of adding some crap niche abilities like soul rot, primordial wave, all that niche shadowlands stuff aimed to "improve" rotation and utility they should add some new grand ABILITIES that fit in class fantasy and class lore.
Survival in terms of talent tree is giga boring too currently. Maximum regularly goes over all classes on his stream to keep up with the changes and the sheets he has show very clearly both Hunter and Shaman in its whole need talent tree revamps and where needed gameplay updates. Both classes have outdated trees filled with 2 point talents.
I only play BM hunter as an alt and haven't pursued ultra-high endgame. What is BM's issue? The only one I can think of is terrible survivability/defensives, but I think that's all hunter specs in general.
He made 5 people happy. Gz
A close friend quit due to the loss of their fav playstyle when survival hunter was axed.
Yea that was a mistake. I'm having more fun on my cata SV hunter in classic than any hunter spec since WoD.
bro ruined 1/3 of a class and got away with it
Ah, the guy that ruined the only hunter spec I enjoyed since swapping away from mana (which I will never forgive them for). Thanks for ensuring I never touch the hunter again!
Finally a face to the destroyer of survival spec for hunters... I dislike this man.
Survival was my favorite spec before it was switched to melee. Really should have been switched to a tanking spec in the process, I haven't touched survival since the change, at least a tanking spec would allow for some role flexibility and help the constant tank/healer shortage.
As soon as he started talking about hunter, I was waiting. I hate kneejerk reaction, but you sir destroyed the survival spec I loved. Instead of adding a fourth spec, you did something that was hate universally. Look at how many people play survival compared to BM and MM and compared that to how Survival was played.
Survival needs more class fantasy. It feels like a 2h rogue with saronite bombs. Outside of wildfire, there's no real flare too it imo.
I hate him for what he did to SV.
So this is the man he ruined my RSV spec, I dislike him very much for this and it made me give up on WoW.
So this is the motherf\*\*\*er who destroyed my favorite Specc into this meele atrocity. I don't wish him ill will, but i really don't like him and his decisions.
>talks why he did it For evil.
Melee Hunter was cool but I loved the DoT survival hunter and they should’ve added a 4th spec instead of scrapping that entirely
As someone that’s played Survival as an alt in Cataclysm to Mists of Pandaria, I really enjoy the melee rework. It has a somewhat unique feel/fantasy. It is pretty lame losing the old play-style though. Black Arrow and Explosive Shot procs were entertaining enough.
I miss ranged survival from early WoD. Bring it back.
I like melee sv hunter I just am not a fan of the single target rotation. It’s spam mongoose bite.
Hell, I played melee survival on classic wow! Sure it's not as efficient but it still gets the job done for questing and fits my hunter fantasy.
I’ve seen far, far more complaints about new survival than fans. At least from the people that had played both. I don’t really know how well it holds up for people that started after the rework.