Everyone uses mongoose bite. Should be baseline, honestly. Nobody uses raptor.
It’s a ranged resource builder, it’s fine.
1: No it wasn’t, that title goes to hellcarver + butchery, or mongoose bite.
2: The talent is terrible so it doesn’t really matter.
Considering how it’s better than all three, I don’t really see the problem.
Legion survival and WoD were easily far worse than this.
WoD Survival was far better than any of the melee iterations could ever hope to be.
I’d agree with you if we were talking MoP, but since we’re talking WoD, you’re wrong.
WoD Survival was practically the same spec as MoP Survival. Not having a cooldown/Kill Shot sucked but it was the same core gameplay.
WoD was good for survival mostly. The problem came at the end of the spec when blizzard stopped tuning us. We needed dot scaling with haste.
Then we got the new talent tree stuff that over loaded our bars and nerfs to the signature shots to push the new abilities and then. We turned into a mess, then melee…bleh
The single biggest problem with Survival was it’s inability to burst. This was actually a stated goal of their design for the spec; sustained damage over burst. That was also ostensibly the reasoning behind not having a cooldown (I’m sceptical of this because we were meant to have one according to their statements in WoD beta but they just never ended up adding it).
Funnily enough, that wouldn’t have been much of a problem. There were other sustained damage specs at the time and they had existed in the past before. Hell, Survival itself did great in the first two raids of WoD. Then HFC and the legendary ring happened, along with the general encounter design of that instance (i.e. “how can we shoehorn a priority add that needs to be burst down on every single fight”). People forget it nowadays but that legendary ring really did screw everything up, and everyone predicted it. Apparently Blizzard really didn’t think that a raidwide 2-minute cooldown that massively multiplied the value of your DPS while it was up would affect class balance that much, but it led to probably the worst spec tuning we’ve seen since the early WoW days and Survival was the biggest victim.
We often refer to the ridiculous nerf to Serpent Sting in that patch as the reason Survival ate dirt. There’s a lot of weight to that. The nerf effectively took away 15-20% of the Patchwerk damage of the spec away and pretty much entirely removed its ability to effectively AoE; for reference, Marksmanship had better sustained AoE than Survival did… and, if you remember, Marksmanship for all intents and purposes didn’t have sustained AoE. But if we pretend that nerf never happened… SV would have been screwed anyway. They actually gave a massive hotfix buff to ranged SV at the end of July 2015, just a few days before Legion and melee SV were announced. They buffed the main abilities by something like 20%. It didn’t change a thing; Survival was still bottom of the barrel by a mile and a half. Because of the legendary ring. There was just no scenario where Survival fares well in 6.2 because of the existence of that legendary. Hell, even without the legendary SV would have been at a disadvantage because of their aforementioned repetitive fight design in HFC that prioritised add burst.
What Survival needed in WoD, in my opinion, was:
So, to summarise: SV was screwed in WoD because they doubled down on the “sustained damage over burst damage” paradigm while then going on to make the most burst-favouring raid tier they’ve ever conceived.
Not even halfway through the thread and people gotta make it all about them and ranged SV.
The idea itself isn’t bad, OP. It’s certainly different from just about every other melee spec, and I’m just thankful that the stupid channeled melee ability is gone.
SV has the idea of persistence hunting down pretty good: whittling down an opponent at range with weapons and pets, then finishing it off when it’s too tired to run. Thematically, that’s why flanking strike is a talent rather than a base ability like Kill Command: sooner or later, you’re going to have to melee, but having one less melee ability means you’re able to keep the ranged-to-melee balance.
By now, we all know bepples is on the spectrum of Aspergers . Please be polite but firm when addressing the circular logic of his posts.
Melee survival works mechanically and thematically much better than ranged survival ever did.
pretty funny considering it’s melee only theme failed in 1 xpac and they had to go back to the explosive and serpent sting theme.
Gonna have to agree with Beeples, and disagree with anyone who says what you’re saying about ranged survival. Point blank Melee survival is nothing but a joke and will always be a joke . It’s a horrible mash of an assassination rogue with a beast master hunter. It’s both horrible and stupid and anyone who thought of an idea to make this hunter fully dependent on it’s one melee attack for damage needs to be moved into another creative department.
The main reason being survival was never meant to be a melee spec.
Shouldn’t you compare it to a finished spec and not something where we caught them ignoring feedback?
Not going to lie, I feel for the pre-melee SV mains. I tried SV on my hunter alt for a while, but switched to MM because I just hated how current SV feels. If they made BM melee, I’d be pissed since I’ve been BM on this toon for a very long time. They really should’ve made a fourth spec for melee. Hopefully they revisit it and add a fourth, but I won’t hold my breath.
Dude, it’s Outlaw and BM if you want to ignore Kabbie, who is anti-melee. Then again, I’ll just say that I disagree with your opinion (which it is) since I’m at work and it’s not worth the time to post what I’ve already posted.
I see you don’t really have a good understanding of melee survivals mechanics vs ranged.
i do, actually. Simply put survival is a joke when compared to other melee classes and specs.
What…
Have you not played Arms? Its dependent on support. Survival has it good, stop crying.
I myself really like the current survival
Please, by all means, explain further than just give us statement that is just a declaration of opinion.
The OP mentioned ranged Survival.
But that’s not at all what Survival is doing from a gameplay perspective, meaning this is an interpretation of the identity of Survival that is based on nothing. The gameplay needs to reinforce the identity.
Again with the pet dependence. Survival depending on pets so much is not a good thing; it’s an overlap with BM’s identity far worse than any alleged MM overlap ranged SV had.
Classy. For the record, I am (autism, not aspergers). Doesn’t make me any less right all the time.
Name one example.
This must be why melee Survival had so many more players and lasted 4 expansions with the same core gameplay and theme while ranged Survival was one of the game’s most niche specs and was remade after just one expansion.
Oh, wait. I have that the other way around. Must be the “spectrum” speaking again.
While it’s not alone in this category, it’s a melee spec that has no must-have utilities. Problem is most of those other specs don’t share a class with ranged specs with the same utility. Feral and Enhancement are the only ones that share a class with a ranged spec at all and both of them are struggling too; just not as badly as Survival because both of them are long-established melee specs and Survival isn’t.
The only spec holding up worse than Survival right now is Subtlety.
That’s not it. Sub is worse as you mentioned, and it’s still a long serving melee spec. The truth is that it’s not struggling. It’s the top PvP Spec, which is something we love to ignore here. It’s a relatively new spec that’s mid-level damage the bulk of the time it’s existed. What would happen if it was given to Outlaw’s level of damage?
ETA why would you want to answer for him? He can speak for himself.