I like Survival. I’ll just go ahead and say it. I like it, but it has it’s contentious areas. However, I believe I have come up with a solution that would prove fairly reasonable and would help to allow a truly customized experience for everyone.
First: Survival (as the basis of the spec) should be a melee spec. Remove Serpent sting, Wildfire Bomb, etc. The base combat abilities should be:
Flanking Strike (replacing Kill Command, because duh).
Serpent Strike (a melee version of Serpent Sting
Mongoose Bite
Raptor Strike
Carve
Various Traps
Harpoon
Sprinkle in a few utility abilities like misdirect, feign death, aspect of the cheetah, eagle eye, etc.
The great change that would help alleviate all of the anger is to offer at least one talent in every row that would change one melee ability into a similar ranged ability. For instance:
Flanking Strike -> Kill Command
Serpent Strike -> Serpent Sting
Mongoose Bite -> Barbed Shot
Raptor Strike - > Arcane Shot
Carve -> Multi Shot
Tar Trap -> Binding Shot
Freezing Trap -> Web Grenade (Wraps the target in a cocoon of spider webs)
Harpoon -> Concussive Shot
The rest of the talents can affect the hunter in a more utility-based way. Sort of the way Trailblazer, camoflauge, etc. work now.
This would allow people to have a melee survival spec, a ranged survival spec or a mixing of the two for the hybrid spec we currently have.
So this sounds a lot like legion SV which yes for the flanking strike switch but
Serpent sting can stay, having a ranged dot has been pretty good in BFA because it reduces our down time on target switching and high movement fights.
Baseline offensive traps are horrible. Explosive trap in legion was very irritating to deal with and on certain bosses it legit never landed or barely did. Given its small trigger area you had to almost completely stop your already gcd capped rotation just to line up your trap correctly which felt bad. Offensive traps should remain talents.
Also why would we need raptor strike if we have mongoose bite? We aren’t swimming in enough resources where raptor strike would even be needed.
And finally with this suggestion, your “ranged” survival is just BM with serpent sting.
Point by point:
The point in switching serpent sting is to create a full baseline of melee abilities. Perhaps serpent sting, for the purposes of a ranged pull, should stay. I’ll concede on this one provided it’s a practical argument.
Yes, baseline offensive traps are horrible, however unless I’m mistaken, you can use macros to have your traps target your current target, or use alt to target the ground at your feet, or ctrl to target your focus target, etc. So the challenges of targeting them can be alleviated through a little bit of preparation. Something a “true hunter” should take pride in.
As for raptor strike and mongoose? Raptor strike should be a low resource cost spammable melee ability, while mongoose has a different functionality. Mongoose should help buff your damage against targets with the debuff applied to them, while raptor strike is the more generic ability.
As to my suggestion being BM with serpent sting - isn’t that what it’s accused of already? Also, I’d like to note, my suggestion is LITERALLY the opposite of that. My baseline would be the complete opposite of BM, and people could utilize talents to make it more like BM. That is the point.
I do not disagree! However many do. Many believe that SV should be more melee oriented. Others believe it should be all ranged. This change would allow everyone to have their preferred style more fully realized. By making the ranged/melee options a question of talent selections, and the damage that comes from the spec cooked into the base abilities more so than specific min-max talent selections, it would add variety, but also stylized flavor to the spec.
The problem here is that most people who are asking for ranged SV, they aren’t after a slightly different version of BM. They also aren’t after a version of current SV but ranged.
Again, no, far from it.
This depends entirely on who you ask.
Most discussions on these forums where people want “ranged SV”, they aren’t after anything close to what you’ve suggested above here.
Traps can be targeted at your feet using the [@player] conditional, or at your mouse cursor by using the [@cursor] conditional. Traps (and other ground targeted abilities like Flare, Eagle Eye, Volley, Resonating Arrow, Wild Spirits, Door of Shadows, and a huge variety of spells from the support classes) do not react to UnitID conditionals (e.g. [@pet],[@target], [@focus], [@party1targettargettargettargettarget])
I’m personally pretty neutral to where Survival is standing when it does its damage - I don’t think melee hunters are an affront to all things ranger/hunter/archer WoW and I like having a melee option, but I wouldn’t lose sleep if the spec were returned to range.
But that said, I strongly disagree that the spec should lose its DoTs. If anything, I think it should have one more, and those DoTs should be more important to the gameplay - they should support a playstyle of little hits building into big attacks of opportunity, fitting the general hunter design theme with an execution somewhere between BM’s push for extended burst windows and MM’s frequent big hits followed by little bursts.
So yes to Mongoose Bite (as a talent), no to losing DoTs, no to using traps in combat - an explosive thrown into an active combat is not a trap, it’s a bomb, so let’s just treat it accordingly.
That said, current SV wouldn’t need any adjustments to its base kit or rotation to support the idea of a ranged option. Whether accomplished through talents or a stance, you could achieve the result by allowing Steady Shot to behave like Raptor Strike/Mongoose Bite for SV, replacing Carve with Multi-Shot at range (here, we would need to replace Butchery with a talent good at melee or range - like some kind of bomb burst, maybe), and replacing Kill Command with a form of Flanking Strike (which should happen anyway).
I understand SV wanting to be more melee, but it’s pretty nice with some of what it has now, even if funky, like shooting a baby crossbow instead or throwing a poisoned weapon or having a poisonous strike.
What kills sv fantasy for me is the damaging traps
Traps to me are something you put on the ground and wait for it to trigger. SV toss traps into the enemies face. It’s like you tossing a rat trap into the rat instead of leaving it on the ground and wait for it to trigger
People who want ranged SV won’t like this because it brings back absolutely none of ranged SV. This isn’t just a matter of wanting SV to be playable at ranged. There was an entire spec that had years of development put into it as well as investment from the Hunter playerbase. People want that back.
How exactly does making Serpent Sting melee improve the spec? I guess it makes sense from an identity perspective, but I doubt there’s a single person who would appreciate that change.
I think the addition of a couple returning abilities and some talent tuning would make this a lot more fun to play. The returning abilities would be Lacerate and Deterrence.
I would return Lacerate as a strong DOT that is not meant to be applied and maintained something like: Deal 400% Atk Power over 6 seconds. 10 sec CD 40 Focus.
Haven’t thought what Deterrence would look like, but having a 2nd defensive would add a nice extra little something to SV
Talent tunings would be:
15 Row-
Incorporate Terms of Engagement into Harpoon and replace with Deep Cuts: While lacerate is active your focus spending abilities to refund its Focus.
Level 90 Row-
Tip of the Spear- Improve: Kill Command, Harpoon, Chakrams increases the damage of Raptor Strike and Carve by 25%, stacking 3 times
Flanking Strike: Redesign: 15 Focus, Casting Raptor Strike and Kill Command in sequence cause you and your pet to deal 35% Atk Pwr. Additionally Flanking strike will either cause your next Raptor Strike to critically hit or your pet will use it basic attack on your next Kill Command. Increase Kill Command reset chance by 5%.
Level 100-
Have Chakrams count as a Raptor Strike (Mongoose Bite)
I think with these changes it will open up the different play styles for the SV hunter and the incorporation of Terms of Engagement into Harpoon can help increase some of our Focus woes.
Current survival is not a hybrid. Its melee only. Serpent sting doesnt even use your bow. And yes you can use a bow as survival on ptr because for some reason arcane shot is baseline?
This spec is just a mess. Either make it 100% melee or make each ability do range or melee attacks depending on which weapon you have equipped.
Having RSV return through talents is best way to bring back the original play-style while not having to sacrifice another spec. However, Ghorak said it best,
Blizzard went too much into BM and lost what they had plan intentionally with MSV, have a identity that separated from the other two specs.
Having the option of choosing Mongoose Bite or Explosive Shot as SV Tier 6 talent over Tip of the Spear would be a first step. Then also having Black Arrow replace Murder of Crows as a Tier 4 talent option would be the next to bring back RSV.
Likewise, adding more range options to SV can open the way to play as you like spec, with being able to be fully melee, range, or hybrid of the two. There is no reason why each spec needs to lock down to melee or ranged type.
if u pvp as SV, which is the best pvp spec for hunters, in most cases against a melee you are kiting more then 50% of the time and letting ur dots and KC do the dmg, its also the best kiting spec out of the 3 specs. you clearly dont play SV