Preface
I love Survival. It’s been my main spec for 15 years now. I am in favor of Survival as a melee spec; if you’re of the opinion that any tree that keeps it that way is inherently incorrect, then we’re not going to see eye to eye. This post is completely in terms of a melee Survival build.
It’s also a huge wall of text. I tried to organize it into fairly concise chunks, and tried to keep the feedback constructive. To say it as politely as possible, though, I’m incredibly disappointed in this current Talent Tree.
As a last note, I don’t analyze the class tree here. Only Survival specific talents.
Deadly Duo and Coordinated Assault
Deadly Duo reads:
When Kill Command’s cooldown is reset, you have a 5/10/15% chance to reset the cooldown of Kill Shot, and your next Kill Shot can be used on any target, regardless of the target’s health.
Kill Command has a 25% reset chance. You have a 15% chance when it resets to give you a Kill Shot. This means you have a 3.75% chance, on an ability with a 6s CD, to get to use it. For six total talent points in investment between Predator (a necessity to make this work) and Deadly Duo.
This is the only way to use Kill Shot above 20% for Survival. As such, for single-target encounters, this directly impacts the value of Explosives Expert, another 3-point talent, and Coordinated Assault, which now reads:
You and your pet charge your enemy, striking them for Physical damage. You and your pet’s bond is then strengthened for 20 seconds, causing your pet’s Basic Attack [Bite / Claw / Slam] to empower your next spell cast:
Carve: Reduces the cooldown of your Wildfire Bomb by an additional 1 sec.
Kill Shot: Applies Bleeding Gash [Venthyr Legendary] to your target.
The only way to get the Kill Shot effect is through Deadly Duo, or to have them already in execute range. Deadly Duo has only a 3.75% chance of proccing each time you hit Kill Command. There is no other single-target benefit for Coordinated Assault except the initial “Physical damage” on the charge. That’s… clearly a flawed design. There’s a fairly decent chance that Coordinated Assault provides no benefit except the initial damage.
Coordinated Assault does have a follow-up talent, providing 100% crit when Kill Command resets (for 3 talent points). Due to Coordinated Assault no longer boosting your reset chance, though, this talent is basically 3 points for 25% crit chance during that window. There is no benefit to critting, besides the raw damage increase, so there’s no “synergy multipliers” or anything hidden in there. And, again, it’s possible to whiff four Kill Command resets in a row (about a 31% chance) and gain 0 crit from this.
Spearhead
You and your pet charge your enemy, striking them for Physical damage. You then become one with your pet for 12 sec. While active, your pet damage is increased by 25%, Raptor Strike and Mongoose Bite deal an additional 35% damage over 4 sec, and Kill Command has a 20% increased chance to reset.
The first sentence is copy-paste from the Coordinated Assault rework, and the second sentence makes it seem like we’re assembling Voltron. Phrasing aside, this is closer to what the old Coordinated Assault actually was.
Coordinated Assault on live provided 20% damage and 25% Kill Command reset for 20 seconds on a 2-minute cooldown. Here, we have a shorter duration, but higher % damage and lower reset rate. That seems possibly okay! However, it all depends on how the DoT scales with Mongoose Bite and the cooldown. I don’t see any non-Mongoose build going for this.
If the DoT acts like Ignite, this is pretty good. If the DoT is refreshed with the higher effect being reapplied, that’s also pretty good (especially off early crits). If the DoT is replaced with the new one, that’s pretty terrible. This likely adds up to about 27.5-30% DPS for 12 seconds, which unfortunately will really push Survival towards more haste to overly pile in on that window within the Mongoose Bite window. Only getting 8 GCDs by default hurts, so you’re unlikely to see more than about 6 Mongoose Bites within that window. This probably needs a longer window than Mongoose Fury.
Of note, this cooldown does nothing for AoE, so this is probably not a good M+ choice.
Other Circle / Passive Talents
There’s a lot to unpack here. First, let’s form a frame of reference by providing some numbers on the other talent trees revealed so far. There have been 16 trees so far.
The average tree (ignoring Survival) has 37 ± 4 total nodes, covering a range of 33-45 nodes.
Survival has 30.
The average tree (ignoring Survival) has 27 ± 6 one-point nodes, 9 ± 3 two-point nodes, and 1.3 ± 1.3 three-point nodes. There’s six specs without any three-point nodes, eight with 2-3, and Feral has 4. Two of Feral’s are not prerequisites to anything else, at least.
Survival has 10.
Very few of the 3-point talents revealed so far for any class are exactly captivating. However, no other spec has been given 3-point talents that simply provide basic stats for your character. Yes, Thrill of the Hunt for BM provides Crit, but it’s through active gameplay. Survival has flat Crit and flat Crit damage. Notably, no talent provides a proc or buff for landing a critical strike, so this doesn’t provide notable synergy. It’s worth noting they gave MM a 2-point/4% Crit talent as well, and that talent is also disappointing. Unless I missed something, that’s the only other Spec talent that provides raw stats unconditionally.
Even if these talents are numerically good, think of it from a new player perspective. Your friends are learning all of their cool “Mutilate applies a bleed, which multiplies with my other talents!” or “Death Coil reduces the cooldown of Dark Transformation? Neat!” or “Mind Blast cleaves if I keep VT up!” and Survival gets 2% crit damage. For three talents in a row. And no rewards for building crit otherwise. Before they get any talents that boost their crit chance.
Many other multi-point talents given to Survival are effectively identical. Improved Wildfire Bomb and Tactical Advantage are basically just %Damage increases to Wildfire Bomb. Spear Focus and Sweeping Spear are the same way for Raptor Strike. Killer Companion is identical to Improved Kill Command from the Hunter Class Tree (and half as good as BM tier-1 talent Killer Command). Currently, Kill Command deals pretty weak damage, with a significantly lower attack power modifier than anything else in our kit. It’s unlikely to suddenly be a giant nuke, and 10% more of a pittance is still pretty small and unexciting. Realistically, any “unconditional small % damage buff” talent doesn’t feel good to unlock. It’s a tax. And Survival has more than any other class by a landslide.
In any other class, Predator would be a 1-point talent; is it that different from Rime from an action-economy standpoint, or Ruthlessness from a resource-generation standpoint? Lunge is a 1-point talent for Outlaw, and their weapons are shorter than a spear.
Improved Harpoon is the worst kind of talent. It’s boring, it doesn’t feel good to pump two points into it, and if you are taking it, it’s basically a 3-point talent for Terms of Engagement.
Energetic Ally is in a competitive slot deep in the tree. Conversely, max resource increases are in tier 1 for Feral and Frost DK. Do we really think that 20 Focus with no other benefit is worth more Tier 3 points for Survival than the 1 point Rogues spend on 50 energy and 15% regen in their class tree?
Among passive talents, only 9 of the 20 directly affect your rotation, while the rest provide numeric advantages. That’s pretty much all that needs to be said.
Square and Octagonal Talents
Just to be brief, Survival also has the fewest Spec-specific abilities designed for it in the game (10), tied with Outlaw. Outlaw, however, has the most passive talents designed for it with 35 (this has kind of always been their thing). The other pure DPS have about 12-16, while tanks and healers have more. Mentioning this sounds like a kid complaining about getting fewer presents at Christmas, but it’s fairly obvious the team is having issues coming up with abilities for Survival.
Aspect of the Eagle is now available no earlier than level 51, while it’s available at 24 on live. There’s no reason for it to be so deep in the tree from that perspective alone.
Carve and Butchery together is two bland abilities making a bland choice. Carve isn’t even given the cooldown reduction baseline to make up for it, so it’s an additional tax.
Suggestions
I’m not a game designer. “Players know what they don’t want, but they don’t know what they want” is a pretty true quote. However, you can kind of see what they’re going for here, and so I have a few vague suggestions to help replace current “tax” and “filler” talents. Obviously none of these are perfect, but they’re starting blocks that seem to be untouched.
Move some talents up the tree, and reduce point bloat. Energetic Ally and Aspect of the Eagle have no business being in Tier 3. Most of the %damage-only talents just… need to be baked into the base damage of the skill, and replaced with something interesting.
Provide a benefit for Critical Strike. Especially for the Coordinated Assault / Coordinated Kill line. Even consider turning Sharp Edges into a stacking buff that you can keep up whenever you crit with Kill Command. It’s clear that they want Survival to want Crit, but it’s literally only a flat advantage right now. Alternatively, make Predator provide resets based on crit chance. That’s probably a more extreme suggestion, granted. Or, you know, Expose Weakness was a pretty good crit payoff.
Change Deadly Duo to “When you reset Kill Command twice in a row” or “guarantee on reset with PPM” or anything instead of random chance. This should be fairly self explanatory. The Low%Proc-on-a-Low%Proc thing has got to go.
Traps. In Cataclysm, we got the initial “you need to commit to a spec” talents. When we did so, the descriptor for Survival was:
A rugged tracker who favors using animal venom, explosives and traps as deadly weapons.
As it stands, Survival as a tree only touches on “explosives.” While Serpent Sting (and a single-upgrade choice) are available in the class tree, as well as Steel Trap now being available to all hunters for some reason, Survival doesn’t have a single talent that mentions Traps. That seems like an absolutely glaring omission. Please not Soulforge Embers, though; using Flare for DPS feels so bad. On the venoms note, the Venomous Fangs Azerite Power is pretty cool imho.
Add talents that help Survival… survive. Attacking during Turtle, healing during Turtle, bonus Leech (even if only on Raptor Strike like Legion had!), etc. Feral still gets their Instant Regrowths for using talents, so this including non-DPS talents isn’t exactly unheard of so far.
Anything playing into Camouflage. Camo just seems like such a Survival ability. It’s the Spec icon! Would be cool to get some kind of benefit for using it, even if it’s just as part of the opener (say, 5 seconds of focus gen or something tame like that).
Conclusions
The talent tree is in a very alpha state, to say things nicely. There’s a lot of the fantasy of the Survival hunter that has been unexplored. A lot of talents are bland filler, while others won’t actually lead to interesting gameplay in their current state. It seems fairly apparent that this tree received significantly less attention than any of the Rogue specs, or even BM Hunter, that were released today.
Thank you
Although I am a little sad. With my build it seems like I won’t have enougv points to keep Serpent Sting and Viper’s Venom. Oh well. I may take Fury of the Eagle to help round out the rotation.