Choosing Survival Hunter at Level 10

Classes Hunter
1

The Problem

When starting a new Hunter you choose your specialization at level 10. This gives you 1 point to place in the class tree. Your options are Posthaste and Natural Mending.

Unfortunately for anyone choosing Survival, this leaves you in the terrible position of having no actual combat abilities except for Kill Shot, which will never see use because of how fast everything dies at that level.

A large part of the problem is that if you look at the Specialization Tab and look over at the Survival Preview, it is explained that Survival prefers a Polearm or Staff. Below this you see the sample abilities that are listed, Raptor Strike and Coordinated Assault, which both include red text declaring that they require a 2H melee weapon to use.

So the player is lead to believe that they need a 2H melee weapon, only to find that as a melee spec, you don’t actually get a melee ability until level 13 when you can finally talent into Raptor Strike. This means that for the first 3 levels as a Survival Hunter, you’re actually feeling like you should be using a Bow because this gives you access to Arcane Shot and Steady Shot, though it oddly prevents you from being able to use Kill Shot.

This feels terrible and confusing. I can only imagine what would be going through a new player’s mind trying to unravel this experience.

Suggested Solution

Raptor Strike is about as basic as it gets. This ability should be known upon character creation and players should have both a ranged and 2H melee weapon in their inventory, letting new players know from the start that melee combat is an option for Hunter.

After making Raptor Strike a baseline ability, replace its spot on the Survival Tree with Serpent Sting. This is an easy fix that brings back a staple of the spec that many players are missing. It also alleviates the issue of Mongoose Bite players having to waste a point on Raptor Strike when they’re just going to have to spend another point to replace it in a few levels.

Bonus

Remove the 2H weapon restriction from Kill Shot. It creates unnecessary confusion when you have some ranged abilities requiring a ranged weapon and then this other ranged ability requiring a melee weapon.

10 Likes
2

The talent trees in general are a mess IMO. Way too convoluted. Not to mention they should have both trees unlock and the “given abilities”.that require no points immediately unlock.

4 Likes
3

New players? What are those?

4

Staggering the acquisition of new abilities serves two purposes.

First, leveling up feels more fun and engaging when you gain more than just a minor numerical increase. Spacing these abilities out across the level range helps to retain that feeling of fun and increased power.

Second, it affords players time to actually learn how to use the tools they’ve gained before they gain the next tool. If everything were to unlock all at once it would feel quite overwhelming for many players.

5

SV hunter doesnt have their core attack ability until talented at level 13…no, just no. They are melee…replace the ranged abilities with raptor strike and something else…

6

Sir… our “core” ability isn’t even our main ability or top damage ability, its literally a focus dump these days when everything else is on cd. I do think kill command should be baseline so or first point can be raptor strike or wildfire bomb.