This, so this!
I agree that having so many multi-point talent nodes is a problem, especially when you compare SV to the arms spec tree.
Addressing this becomes tricky because SV currently doesn’t have a lot of knobs or pieces you can mold with talents. I mean, the sort of things that would help would involve:
- Adding ways to mold Wildfire Bomb (WFE, maybe a talent that extends the DoT, and another that gets rid of the DoT and frontloads the damage)
- Addressing the lack of a central mechanic. If Mongoose Fury were the spec’s base mechanic, you can then add talents to alter it in some way. Examples of this include having it start at a max of 3 stacks with the choice of talenting into extending the number of stacks (to 5), Tip of the Spear in its current form, and/or adding a spender skill that scales with the number of stacks it consumes
- Settle on one AoE skill (be it Butchery or Carve) and then build on it. Three things that come to mind with this be to talent into letting the AoE skill spread Serpent Sting, generate Mongoose Fury stacks, and cooldown reduction like that offered by Frenzy Strikes. You could even add a talent connecting or replacing Butchery/Carve with Fury of the Eagle.
- Adding survivability nodes for SV: Blizzard needs to treat SV like a melee and make the spec hardier than BM and MM hunters. This could come passively (like my Ranger Knight talent that increases Armor and Versatility) or done through a unique defensive cooldown.
There’s obviously more ways to skin this cat, but I think the above would make a good starting point.
5 Likes
The disarm pvp talent will help with this in pvp, pve however…
This is a great post. It’s also clear from just playing the game that the trees are not finished. The one’s reworked over 10.0 > 10.1 (Warrior, Druid, Paladin, Resto sham) are way better then the others. This data shows it. More choice nodes, less 2 point nodes, more build options, less dead talents.
As a result those specs are also overall strong. Ret was overtuned, but having 14 choice nodes and almost all 1 point nodes also helps.
To play devils advocate for a second, part of hunters kit is in the pets (rip MM), so those choices are not reflected in the tree. I would say the pets are worth about 2 choice nodes? Something like that. Overall all 3 hunter trees need work. (Also pls someone save mage).
3 Likes
I’m glad you brought this up! Not that I expect every spec tree to have identical design or even similar passives/options, but here’s a good example of the disparity I mentioned in older talent trees (Survival, for example) and newer talent trees (Retribution).
Survival has to spend 2 entire talent points for 4% crit, while Ret spends 1 point to get 5% crit on abilities (I do realize the difference in flat crit vs ability crit, but when so much of your damage is from abilities I ask does that matter—especially when it costs you so many of your precious talent points) on top of Ret getting bonus damage on Hammer of Wrath.
Again, not saying every spec needs identical talents/passives, just highlighting the difference in design space even 7 months into Dragonflight has shown us.
I think Beast Mastery/Survival has so much potential to offer great and dynamic talent trees, we just need the number of nodes to go up and the cost of nodes to go down.
12 Likes
Where’s the rework blizz? The talent trees are so bad for hunter, please!!!
3 Likes
Obviously it’s not coming for 10.1 but I feel if we keep giving reasonable, actionable, and frequent feedback we could see a revamp for BM/SV trees later on in Dragonflight. Here’s hoping! 
14 Likes
Its not just BM / SV, the hunter tree needs help too and the MM tree is starved for points as well.
3 Likes
This is probably the most revealing post you’ve made on the thread. That talent comparison is just unacceptable.
1 Like
I can see what you mean. Killer Accuracy and Hunter’s Knowledge could be combined into one talent. Chimaera Shot and Multi-Shot could also stand to share a switch node (even if it would necessitate a redesign of Trick Shots). Focused Aim, Steady Focus and Sharpshooter could be trimmed to one point, too.
1 Like
Hi there! So I really wanted to jump in and provide my full thoughts on survival for ALL CONTENT TYPES and the base hunter tree at the moment as it really does have quite the perplexing setup that confuses me as a player.
Starting with the hunter tree!
The current iteration of the hunter tree is bizarre compared to other classes in the game. Hunter’s tree is currently designed in a fashion of closed off tiers that do not interact with each other at all.
Tier one
Basic abilities and modifications on cooldowns.
Tier two
Utility and trap modification
Tier three
Straight damage
This design heavily favors the bottom of the tree for points and makes it feel like using points on utility talents such as improved mend pet and sentinel owl are useless. This is due to the fact that each point in the bottom of the tree feels point for point better for damage then most of the top and middle of the tree altogether.
The Survival Tree
I will often be comparing survival’s current tree with the newly reworked retribution paladin. I will reference specific spells and abilities by name but will not include pictures here.
Survival’s tree is OK at best. It is not good, great, or spectacular feeling. It is just a tree that is there. It was previously discussed at the top of this thread that there are currently 8 nodes that read *increase the damage of x ability or abilities by x%, Not only does this make the tree boring as a player, but it makes it feel inferior to other classes such as enhancement shaman and retribution paladin.
A great example of this is one of the talent brought up by OP here. Sharp edges is a 2 POINT NODE that gives 4% crit damage and paladin gets a 1 POINT NODE that gives 5% ability crit damage and then also has a funny little effect with hammers. There are several comparisons that can be made in this way with the newly reworked ret tree but I will expect most players and devs to take a look and see for themselves. It’s important to do that so that we can see the general differences.
Additionally, talents such as Harpoon, terms of engagement, aspect of the eagle, tip of the spear, and even the basic raptor strike all feel terrible as talents that are given to the hunter since they were baseline in our kit for quite some time.
This brings me to the largest point of this post: Gameplay Loops:
Survival’s inherent gameplay loops are absolutely magnificent.
Single Target: Mongoose bite Window
This single target ability feels like it should be the baseline for survival’s internal kit but it is currently a talent on the right half of the tree. Survival’s most iconic ability other then wildfire bomb creates a solid gameplay loop of pooling focus, going on a run with casting as many mongoose bites in a 15 second window, then going again.
AoE- Carve-Butchery, Frenzy Strikes and Wildfire Bomb.
This gameplay loop is also fun and fast paced to play. It inspires quick reaction time and maximizing the amount of enemies to gain the most CDR on wildfire bomb. This is further accentuated by the Wildfire infusion talent that makes the bombs interact with survivals kit even more.
However, there are two downsides.
First- Carve feels like it is inferior to butchery in every way. It is never taken when looking at stats from warcraftlogs and even further it just feels bad damage wise. Maybe more can be done here!
Second - It feels like the carve-butchery and frenzy strikes should be akin to beast cleave/multi shot. Both active lines feel like they should be baseline for the spec as a basic gameplay loop.
Finally, lets talk about survival’s cooldowns.
Survival’s cooldowns are unlike any other in the entire game. They have significantly different functions between the 4 of them and each has their own individual problems in feel.
Flanking Strike
This ability is actually the least egregious of the bunch. It is a 30 second cooldown that is reduced by frenzy strikes. It provides you and your pet energy and a chunk of damage in one blow, but does not interact with survival’s kit at all in any capacity otherwise. The CDR reduction is sweet from frenzy strikes, however having no interaction with a mongoose bite window makes the spell feel bad to press in single target just for a minute focus boost.
Spearhead
This cooldown and is subsequent capstone actually feel pretty good. The gameplay loop is focused on maximizing kill command resets. So basically Mongoose bite - Mongoose bite - kill command- repeat. The bleed is hefty and the 50m charge attached to the ability makes it spectacular in PvP.
Coordinated Assault
Okay this is where we get funky. Coordinated Assault has some fundamental issues that make it hard to use for newer players and often requires add-ons or pet auto trackers to use to the fullest.
First, because CA is based off of PET applications of Bite/Claw/Smack - the ability can be mostly cancelled if the pet is dead/crowd controlled/ unable to attack your target. This COMPLETELY invalids the first half of the cooldown that empowers wildfire bomb and kill shot,.
Additionally, since the empower effect is ONE spellid, you must choose what ability to use properly or risk losing significant damage. Even further, since there is significant button bloat with survival’s rotation with mongoose bite windows or bomb/carve, you can actually LOSE empowers to not being able to consume the buff in time.
All of these together make Coordinated Assault feel like a cooldown that is hard to understand and VERY difficult to use properly.
P.S. - on the PTR for the first 3 weeks it was introduced, the Neltharion trinket had this cooldown listed as “coordinated attack” instead of “Coordinated Assault”. Funny but kind of annoying considering survival gets few changes as it is and the abilities can’t be spelled properly even.
Fury of the Eagle
A returning favorite from legion that is redesigned for new survival. This spell is flavorful, and finally does damage after 3 distinct damage buffs. The kill command resets giving it 3 seconds of CDR is also a neat thing and gives it sweet interactions with pheromone bomb. This does lead to some weird decision making where you may only cast kill command (single target) to fish for and AoE ability CDR but im not sure what can be done about that.
Each of these cooldowns also have between 2-3 ADDITIONAL Capstone nodes UNDER them to make them stronger. This design also bottom-loads the tree for additional points needed.
It should also be noted that spearhead and coordinated assault can be taken together, FOTE and Coordinated assault can be taken together but not all three. This is fine, but just something to note.
This gives a solid idea of how I feel about survival currently. Even just pruning the redundant talents would make the class feel wonders better I would think but I do not want to pass judgement on that. I just want to bring feedback about the tree where I feel it is needed.
Finally, it feels really bad that survival is the laughing stock of the melee dps at the moment. Community perception of the spec is really bad and you are often dropped from keys and PvP since players do not respect and do not want you. I hope this can change in the future with good class changes and help.
Thanks for reading.
4 Likes
Carve 31% ap 35 focus cost 6s cd => the no go
vs
Butchery 97% ap 30 focus 9s cd => the spiky aoe
To make a Carve a potential choice, it would require something like no cd + enhance by mongose fury/proc mongoose fury => could turn it into a window aoe
Butchery would be a choice for low key because targets dies faster and Carve could be for high key (more hp, you can have that lil ramp up before spamming)
and latent poison in pve, feels weird for our loop/window rotation.
Talent that will do more damage if you don’t do damage/play your normal rota.
They can pull big number but usually you only at most 2 stacks of latent and 1 tots so it’s kinda low (but in pvp it’s okay)
how do you feel about these ones ?
2 Likes
Hunters don’t have a proper dev, and no wonder. Blizzard is going in California style direction so we may as well get used to bad content and lack of quality design.
When I see them posting videos of their employees and their stories I’m surprised this still looks on a proper game
2 Likes
You just sort of ignore it being there in ST and let it stack up in AoE. Latent is fine imo.
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Beast Cleave should be baseline for all BM Hunters.
There. I said it.
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There are a lot of things that could be baseline/cheaper in the BM tree, that’s for sure. Needing to talent into multi-shot AND beast cleave is a bit disheartening
8 Likes
There’s 2 glaring flaws in the BM spec tree and playstyle that make it difficult to balance and aggravating to play with.
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Too many modifiers for a small amount of damage/severe lack of burst leading to a real lack of frontloaded damage, which means that the spec is non ideal for many kinds of competitive content - Breaking shields, killing priority adds, pushing a boss out of a phase quickly, mass group dps to line up with lust/encounter dmg boost, add packs in m+ - all of these are areas where BM damage suffers. How you do damage is important, and with the current design of “steady damage over 6 minutes” is ideal for an extremely narrow band of content.
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Secondary pets are still broken with the new talents on the bottom right of the spec tree. Which means that no matter how that side is changed it cannot be viable.
As to solutions? Aspect of the wild is designed like a burst CD but without an absurd buff to cobra shot damage it cannot function like one in its current iteration, it needs to return to baseline and have a significant damage amp added to it in some way. Replacing the spot in the tree with the primal instincts/rapid reload functionality to make it an m+/aoe amp would set it up well to solve current damage profile issues in AOE, and a damage amp off the GCD would do well to solve those same issues in single target. Wild Spirits also neatly solves this issue as well, it’s nice to not be tied to a ground area talent, but the lack of burst is a sore point in more difficult content.
As to the severe lack of talent points(and the abundance of 2pt and 3pt nodes) there are several old things that would do well coming back to the talent tree in their existing iterations or toned up or down as appropriate.
Primal Instincts (Revamped Aspect of the Wild dependent)
Rapid Reload (Revamped Aspect of the Wild Dependent)
Dance of Death (just a fun proc)
Wild Hunt Tactics (Upfront Burst Damage solution)
First Strike (Upfront Burst Damage solution)
Hammer of Genesis(Upfront Burst Damage Solution)
Of course there are many other old set bonuses etc but there are the most recent, and some of the easiest ones to point to that can specifically solve some of the dps issues of the class. Paired with a reduction in node cost it would allow more room for variety in style of play while also helping the damage profile issue.
4 Likes
A case could be made for baseline Carve that can be talented into either Butchery or grant and scale with Mongoose Fury. The main question then becomes how much it should gain per stack. Mongoose Bite gains 15%, so should Carve in this hypothetical design gain anywhere between 3-5%?
Idea would be to have a MB window for aoe being MB till 5 then spam Carve so 5 stack bonus each time.
Carve is 31% AP so with 75% bonus it would be 54.25% (still far from butchery)
But it would work like MB (spammable, using KC, FS for focus regen during MB window, etc.)
If Carve was baseline (with the 6s cd) that’s another story, evolving it into a better than actual butchery would make sense. And a choice going along with all the KC reset talents could be made, for example on KC reset next Carve does x more damage (a carve tip of the spear like talent) and/or Carve gives next KC a 50% cleave.
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Wait, is the percentage additive or multiplicative? I’ve interpreted the interaction between Mongoose Bite and Mongoose Fury to be 157% AP + an additional 15% per stack (so at 5 stacks Mongoose Bite would hit for 232% AP). That’s why I kept the percentage low on the hypothetical Carve, since I imagined that you’d otherwise end up with a Carve that has no cooldown hitting for 106% AP at 5 stacks of Mongoose Fury (assuming the bonus from MF was additive).