Marks burst aoe is explosive shot salvo volley into trick shots aimed/rapidfire and maybe wailing. This is burstier than how bm and SV puts out cleave. Also, windrunners isn’t an aoe ability and nobody uses barrage because it sucks.
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What makes this particularly problematic is how players feel compelled to completely avoid AOE talents to have competitive ST damage. Obviously it’s fine to have specs that focus on one or the other, but I haven’t found another spec where the difference is so stark. It feels crazy that people completely opt out of all active AOE–skipping multi-shot, beast cleave, and kill cleave–only to leave themselves with passive AOE from Stomp.
I want to second this, and also note that the placement of those multi point talents down at the bottom left-hand portion of the tree feels absolutely terrible. The path to Dire Pack (which makes Dire Beast-related talents feel worthwhile) typically involves spending 8 points across 4 talents, with 5 of them being spent on just two talents, Dire Command and Dire Frenzy.
Adding insult to injury is the fact that these talents seem meant to synergize with Master Handler (itself a meh talent because of how Aspect of the Wild works) on the right side of the tree, but the immense point premium spending 7 points on 4 “summoned beast” talents–Dire Beast/Command/Frenzy/Pack–means you generally can’t afford to pick up Master Handler if you want to, at least not without sacrificing much better talents.
Additionally, the unlock paths feel bad. Dire Beast seems like it’s supposed to be an attractive pick, but it’s locked behind either a two point talent no one picks up (Cobra Sting) or an admittedly powerful yet extremely expensive passive (Thrill of the Hunt). A path from Animal Companion to Dire Beast would mean you could pick up DB and basic AOE talents, and if for some reason Master Handler becomes relevant there’s a shot at being able to pick it up alongside the actual talents that make it work.
It might also make Hunter’s Prey a valid path, although part of the problem with that talent is that Kill Shot doesn’t have any modifiers in the BM tree so it’s not high priority even when it’s available, and also the proc overlaps with times where it would be available anyway (i.e., under 20%). In order for the “extra” Kill Shots to really feel like a bonus, the proc needs to make KS not incur a CD in addition to simply resetting it. Often it just feels like the talent just changes when you get to use KS against a particular target (e.g., at 25% instead of 20%), but there’s not enough time for it to feel like you got an additional one.
Two final points–Kindred Spirits should just be a BM spec passive if it’s not going to do anything else, and for arctic bola to be worth using for BM (maybe it isn’t meant to be–just like MM never specs into Kill Command), it would have to proc from a primary focus dump (i.e., Kill Command) like it does for the other specs or at least not from the lowest priority button BM has. Having it triggered by Cobra Shot is like having it proc from Arcane Shot for the other specs–in other words, unattractive.
Tough? Who’s to say.
Awkward, however? Very much so.
At level 10, you switch to Survival and suddenly you have a generator in Kill Command, Steady Shot, and a spender in Arcane Shot. You don’t get Raptor Strike till you spend your first talent in Survival. Sure, that’s only a level away, but that’s an important level to set up exactly what you’re doing.
I think it would make more sense for the new player experience if Raptor Strike was baseline to the spec.
Furthermore, as you level up as Survival (example) most of your mid-level and even as your approach end level talent points are going into the aforementioned entirely passive, entirely flat talents of “Increase Mongoose Bite damage by 5/10%” “Increase Wildfire damage by 8/12%” for example. These are several levels where your gameplay isn’t changing at all, or really sort of any observable impact of investing talent points aside from watching numbers go up.
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This is a good point and something I hadn’t considered. The first thing that comes to mind to address this would be to make lv10 give you a point on each the class and the spec tree, though that raises the question of whether it would create issues since this would have to be done across the board. Would any specs become broken from having an extra point to spend in the spec tree?
PS: On a concept level it would make sense for a player to get a point in both upon reaching lv10, since that’s when the player is introduced to the concept of specs within their chosen class. So at least on that end it would work.
it doesn’t even need to be that complicated. plenty of specs get access to things baseline as soon as you hit level 10. For example, I’m leveling a Mage at the moment and as soon as I hit 10 and switched to Fire, I got access to Fireball.
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Fair enough. I would prefer some rule that applies to everyone (something like “every spec gets a freebie at lv10” or “everyone gets a class and spec point to spend at lv10”). You look at specs like Arms and Destro and you’d think that the spec trees are designed to give you a main part of the spec in the first talent node, but then you have exceptions like Ret paladins and Fire mages that muddy the waters.
it’s certainly tricky! consistency is quite important, but I do think it might be easier to just ensure each spec gets it’s super baseline ability for free at 10. definitely something to consider!
All the data provided does a VERY good job of summarizing some of the biggest issues for the Survival talent tree.
One of the biggest issues is the amount of bloat in the tree and I just hope this can be looked at or have some nodes converted to one point nodes. We have an egregious amount of two-point nodes that are passive abilities with no gameplay alteration. It really limits build diversity and choice when so many of these nodes are required to be picked up, but do nothing for our gameplay.
We don’t need a spec-level revemp of the entire tree, just another pass over all the nodes to address the bloat.
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Augmentation Evoker, the new DPS spec, has 41 talent nodes. This is 5 more than Survival has and 6 more than Beast Mastery has.
Begging and pleading that Hunter gets some love / updates in 10.2, or at least a “Hey you’re on the sidelines for DF but expect good things in 11.0”
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Yeah frankly at this point it feels like Bliz is just spitting in our faces. Paladin getting a second spec rework. Hunter is the red headed step child of WoW atm. We’re just suffering from success because so many people play hunter they assume everything is fine.
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Well, Mages (and Rogues, allegedly) are getting attention this patch, so who’s to say Hunter won’t be looked at for 10.1.7 or further
Don’t forget druids and evokers, there’s just no dev time to make hunters fun apparently
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With the new Fire Mage update today, it definitely reignited my feedback that SV and BM need touch ups. Raptor Strike and Beast Cleave (and more, probably) definitely need to be baseline to the spec and not taking up valuable talent budget.
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I’d still push for baseline Mongoose Bite (or make Mongoose Bite the first talent node in the tree) so that SV can get some well-deserved cohesion.
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there can be more cohesion if 8 talents aren’t “X ability does Y% more damage”
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I’m surprised why blizzard didn’t make Mongoose fury a mastery thing. More mastery higher damage percentage. You start with base percentage that mongoose furry offers now, and it should increase the damage of many abilities. MB, WFB, CV or Butchery especially FOTE. That should be our bread and butter for AOE. As well adding some interaction so that mongoose bite reduces the cd of FOTE by 1 sec and carve/butchery by 0.5 seconds per target it hits. It would create an interesting play style for keys.
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Isn’t it fascinating BM is one of the very few specs in the game with a 3 talent point node?
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OP, I’d point out that myself and a few others were posting about this in Beta for Dragonflight. We posted basically the same info (current to trees at that time).
Got us nowhere, heck some hunters in beta even naysayed our concerns!
What I am hoping is that Hunters are in line to get Mage treatment
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We should be hoping for a Ret-tier rework 
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