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Or at least currently.

The Hunter class has always (as far as I can remember) been the most popular class played (by numbers count.)

With the hype.. I mean release of the Demon Hunter class.. plain old Hunters have been relegated to 2nd place.

currently the database has (real numbers this time) 308,199 Demon Hunters
and 287,246 Hunters.

The least played class is the Monk with only 132,766 at this time.

these numbers are based upon the data captured during the last 30 days, so yes there is some bias in the numbers.

We will need to wait until September 9th to get a better picture.

The real question will be how the number turn out in six months.. with Demon Hunter be a flash in the pan.

Has Blizzard crippled the other classes?
I am still scratching my head over Melee Hunters

Melee hunters was actually a thing, all the way back in Vanilla Beta (or wad it Alpha?).

Survival (called Outdoors Man, back then) had several melee attacks, the only ne I recall the name of was Raptor Strike.
When Vanilla was releasd, Blizzard changed their minds and made all three specs ranged, but the melee spells were not removed until MoP.

So making Survival melee in Legion, is nothing new.. It's actually going back to the roots..

I started playing the game not long after initial release, so all I have ever known is Hunters preferred to attack from range.. but when the enemy got too close could in extremis melee (poorly).

From all I have seen.. Survivalist spec is now for all practical matters only melee.. with traps.

Am I wrong about that?

Might well have been an intended thing in alpha but certainly my recollection of vanilla was that some melee hunters did exist, but were basically a result of far less knowledge and resources than we have now and players just playing what they felt like without knowing (or perhaps caring!) how very ineffective it was Don't think it was ever an effective spec in release, but back then a lot of us didn't really play effectively anyway, I know I was terrible!

I don't expect the DH boom to last long, indeed; they'll likely remain high for a while but after Legion actually releases they'll drop back down again; right now it's "hey, new content!" so everyone's trying it

Balgair wrote:I don't expect the DH boom to last long, indeed; they'll likely remain high for a while but after Legion actually releases they'll drop back down again; right now it's "hey, new content!" so everyone's trying it

I concur..

Back in early MoP, there was Monks everywhere, now BOYD says it's the least censussed class.

Back in WotLK, everyone played DK, now it have normalized quite a bit (I would guess 4th or 5th most played)..

DH is flavour of the month, but once Legion is fully released, most of them will realize that there is no room for that many DHs in raids/BGs/dungeons and many will switch to another class..