DF Survival Suggestions

Classes Hunter
1

Culling - If there are 3 or more enemies with your damage over time effects within 8 yrds of your pet, Kill Command strikes all enemies within 8 yrds.
Option talent. Choose this or Butchery.

Choosing between Carve and Butchery doesn’t feel like much of a choice when one was designed as an improvement over the other. I would much rather have an option to give my pet some AoE capability. Don’t forget to adjust Frenzy Strikes to work with Kill Command when it strikes multiple targets.

Kill or Be Killed - If you have more than 50 Focus, Raptor Strike costs 50 Focus and deals 100% more damage.
Option talent. Choose this or Mongoose Bite.

This is probably the most meaningful change that I would like to see happen. Mongoose Bite is a massive change to how the spec plays, and it seems that players either love or hate it. I personally despise Mongoose Bite.

Spamming a single attack to the exclusion of the rest of one’s tools and resources seems so contrary to the concept of Survival. The spec also has a plethora of other stacking mechanics and could certainly benefit from a frontloaded option with more spacing between uses.

Unfortunately, the talent slot also serves as a roadblock to 10% Raptor Strike damage and 10% Kill Command damage. It feels rather punishing to miss out on these because you don’t care to buy into a mechanic that is detrimental to your playstyle.

Barrage currently reads as MM or BM only. Instead of telling Survival players that they get one less talent to choose from, move Fury of the Eagle to the Hunter tree as Survival’s melee equivalent of Barrage. It is a barrage of melee attacks after all. Just drop the Execute interaction, adjust the cooldown and power, and let it benefit from Aspect of the Eagle.

To fill the empty slot left by Fury of the Eagle in the Survival talents, move Spearhead to that slot. Spearhead works well in this slot as the increased chance to reset Kill Command feels like a natural progression from Explosives Expert and Deadly Duo.

To fill the empty slot left by Spearhead I would suggest the following:

Opportunistic Strikes - Raptor Strike (Mongoose Bite) has a chance equal to its Focus cost to cause your next Kill Command to generate twice the amount of Focus. Kill Command has a chance equal to the amount of Focus it generates to make your next Raptor Strike free.

Lunge feels terrible as a 3-point sink at a pitiful 1 yard of increased melee range per point. Make this 1 point for 3 yards and call it a day.

2 Likes
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If they adding so many shots, reenable ranged weapon slot.

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Suggested this a while back and figured now would be as good a time as any to give it a second glance. Duration and cooldown are open to whatever seems suitable.

2 Likes
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As I look at Wailing Arrow in the MM and BM talents, I feel more certain that Survival is going to need something like the suggestion above just to keep from being removed from groups for not being one of the other specs with that talent.

Ranged dps is historically more sought after because of the dangers of fighting in melee range. While this is ultimately a problem with raid/dungeon encounter design, the fact that it has been so prevalent through the game’s lifespan leaves little room to expect anything different in the future.

Without being overtuned in AoE damage thanks to busted legendary / tier powers, Survival struggles to find acceptance into group content because it doesn’t bring anything to the table that MM and BM could bring while also being able to fight from a safer distance. Don’t compound this problem by giving the safe specs an incredibly potent utility while giving Survival nothing to keep up.

1 Like
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So you just want BM copy paste? The vision of SV is to fight alongside your pet. Pet is there to help you, not to be main source of damage. Butchery is a good choice of talent, has nice combo with sharpnel bomb.

But in general survival needs to be addressed better. In this form where they’re trying to make it hybrid ranged is just plain and bad. They should have pushed sv hunter towards legion style.

Devs should listen less to hunter forums requests :rofl::rofl::rofl:

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I think what this forum needs is even more pointless sv rework threads.

2 Likes
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And in this vision of my pet fighting alongside me you don’t think it would make sense to have an option for my pet to attack all perceived threats to me in his vicinity? Because I assure you that my pit bull would be an absolute berserker if I were attacked by a pack of wolves.

I’m not disputing that it’s a good talent choice. My suggestion asks the player to choose between my proposed talent and Butchery. Carve is inferior to Butchery in every way as Butchery was quite literally designed to be an improved version of Carve. To me, that is no choice. And since they are both melee attacks, I think it would be a more interesting choice of play style to let the player choose between giving the Hunter the AoE strike or giving the pet the AoE strike.

As for the reduced interaction with Shrapnel Bomb, this is completely offset by Bloodseeker.

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BM has pet AOE style, MM has ranged AOE style and SV has melee AOE style.

We will se how much will devs butcher SV with this talent choice, and trying to make it more pet based or push towards ranged.

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Can we not do better than making Coordinated Assault a 3 minute cd so you can make us burn 2 talent points to shave it back down to 2 minutes?

Can we do something with Carve vs Butchery already, because it’s not even a choice. Butchery was designed to be an improvement and will be picked 100% of the time.

Please consider allowing Terms of Engagement to connect to Spear Focus. Then have Spear Focus improve both Mongoose Bite and Raptor Strike again. Then adjust Bloody Claws so that the chance to reset Kill Command is based off of Focus spent instead of Mongoose Fury stacks. This would keep the concept of the design intact while allowing players to choose between picking or passing Mongoose Bite.

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the thread title is DF Survival Suggestions so here is mine with all jokes and no trolling aside.

make it ranged again with venom shots, poison dot explosives and trap launchers that deal massive damage. how it should be and how the spec name implies.

blizzard really needs to bite the bullet and just come to the realization that this nasty experiment failed on every level and its time to face the facts that it will never work and revert it to its glorious form of ranged. plain and simple. they need to get off the high horse and come back down to reality.

6 Likes
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I am very much looking forward to Spearhead but it’s feeling more and more like Mongoose Bite will be a requirement to go this route. Mongoose Bite is such a drastic change to how the spec functions with its ramp-up damage, rigid windows, and exclusion of the rest of the kit during those windows, please give the player more agency in whether or not they want to buy into this mechanic. Either one of the following would work wonders in this regard.

and / or

Coordinated Assault should be reduced back down to a 2 minute cooldown.

Scrap the current Bonded Companion which is just a filler talent that only exists to reduce the bloated cooldown time that was tacked on to Coordinated Assault and replace this with:

Bonded Companion - Raptor Strike and Mongoose Bite generate 5 / 10 Focus for your pet during Coordinated Assault.

Add the following ability augments to Coordinated Assault:

Raptor Strike - Increases the damage of your next Kill Command by 10%.

Mongoose Bite - Costs 5 less Focus.

1 Like
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Mastery needs to be changed. Right now, it’s barely functional in a Raptor/Mongoose-oriented single target build and it’s wholly worthless in a Wildfire Bomb AoE/M+ build (I don’t give a rat’s *** about Carve/Butchery damage in M+, I care that they make Wildfire Bomb cool down faster). SV also needs some AoE pet abilities, as the entire left side of the class tree might as well not even exist.

Suggestion: Increases the damage of your hunter abilities by X%, with a Y% bonus proportional to the ability’s cooldown.
(Raptor Strike and Serpent Sting would get a minor boost, Wildfire Bomb and Kill Command a modest boost, and Explosive Shot and Fury of the Eagle a large boost)

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When they first presented the shift to melee I suggested the mastery increase the damage of your damage over time effects.

What has allowed humans to survive throughout history to become the dominant species on the planet is our ingenuity and use of tools. If you look at each DoT we apply, that is exactly what’s going on. Whether it be Serpent Sting, Wildfire Bomb, Steel Trap, Bloodseeker…all of it comes from the Hunter using ingenuity to convert the resources at his disposal into tools that allow him to survive and overcome the threats he encounters.

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“Spearhead and Coordinated Assault are competing for some space in the tree. We’re hoping to identify a set of abilities to that each augments in a way that feels good, and also would prefer a design that doesn’t encourage you to stack both of them at the same time. Some adjustments are being made to these abilities to try to focus on different parts of your ability sets in a manner that lets both Coordinated Assault and Spearhead hopefully feel both distinct from each other, while still feeling powerful on their own.”
https://www.wowhead.com/news/blizzard-reveals-more-hunter-talent-tree-adjustments-for-all-3-specs-and-class-328081#:~:text=Spearhead%20and%20Coordinated,on%20their%20own.

The way I see it, Coordinated Assault should offer a flurry of back-and-forth opportunistic strikes between Hunter and pet. As one deals a significant strike, it draws the attention of the enemy and opens up an opportunity for the other to land their own significant strike.

With these changes in place, Bonded Companion would generate Focus for your pet during Coordinated Assault. This would allow for more special attacks from your pet and subsequently more augmented attacks from the Hunter.

While Coordinated Assault seeks to set up a flurry of flanking strikes, Spearhead should be about setting up fewer, but more powerful attacks.

Instead of trying to spam Mongoose Bite, this talent combined with Tip of the Spear and Spearhead would generate powerful Raptor Strikes that would subsequently generate powerful bleeds. The higher expenditure of Focus would create greater gaps between Raptor Strikes which would allow for more build-up of Tip of the Spear and help to prevent clipping of active bleeds.

This talent combined with Spearhead’s increased pet damage and chance to reset Kill Command as well as Coordinated Kill’s crit support would transform Kill Command into a deadly AoE that could rival Wildfire Bomb.

It would also open up a playstyle that draws back from all the explosives we’ve seen lately and allow the player to return to a more primal state where one could believe that the Hunter is actually concerned for the well-being of his animal companion.

1 Like
15

There’s quite a bit on the left side of the Survival tree that feels out of place or off the mark in my opinion. In place of what I find to be a bit disjointed, I wanted to create a more cohesive theme that truly represented Survival Hunter.

The Chimera was a 3-headed creature with a lion in the front, a fire-breathing goat in the middle, and a serpent in the rear. I see this as a perfect representation of Survival with its bleeds (lion), Wildfire Bombs (goat), and Serpent Sting (serpent). It seems only fitting to create an Aspect that empowers these weapons.

Viper’s Venom - Raptor Strike and Mongoose Bite have a 50% / 100% (up from 15% / 30%) chance to apply Serpent Sting to your target.

Replace Quick Shot with the following:

Eagle Eye - When Kill Command’s cooldown is reset you have a 30% chance to gain 3 seconds of Aspect of the Eagle and your next Raptor Strike or Mongoose Bite cast within 3 seconds costs no Focus.

Move Fury of the Eagle to the Hunter tree as the melee equivalent of Barrage. Include Fury of the Eagle in the list of abilities improved by Sweeping Spear and Spear Focus.

Replace Fury of the Eagle with the following:

Aspect of the Chimera - Your damage over time effects deal 30% more damage and generate 1 Focus every time they deal damage. Lasts 15 seconds. 1.5 minute cooldown. Cooldown reduced by Born to be Wild.

Replace Ruthless Marauder with the following:

Chimera’s Cunning - Your critical strike chance is increased by 1% / 2% / 3% for each of your damage over time effects on your target. This effect is doubled against enemies below 20% health.

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  1. Separate slots for ranged and melee weapons
  2. Separate animations that depend on your range to target
  3. Different focus generator. (I suggest each time pet special ability does dmg, you get 5 or 10 focus. Double if it crits. (Ofc nbers can be adjusted)
17

Um, no op.

SH is ST, not aoe.
I agree fury needs moved.
A bomb capstone needs in fury spot.
No more execute or KC crap.

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So I can’t help but notice that MM’s talent Serpentstalker’s Trickery gives Aimed Shot a 100% chance to apply Serpent Sting for the cost of a single talent point. I think this is a great talent choice.

Why then does Survival’s talent Viper’s Venom require 2 talent points for a depressing 30% chance to apply Serpent Sting with Raptor Strike / Mongoose Bite? I understand that Raptor Strike / Mongoose Bite can be cast more frequently than Aimed Shot, but requiring 2 points instead of 1 to achieve 100% application seems more than fair.

I hope to see Viper’s Venom improved into a talent that players want to choose instead of feeling like a waste of points that is required to reach Wildfire Infusion.

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Aimed Shot has a cast time and a long cooldown; Raptor/Mongoose is spammable. Viper’s Venom + Wildfire Infusion = 100% uptime on Serpent Sting on half a dozen targets once it’s up. Serpent Stalker’s Trickery just gives Aimed Shot a DoT.

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As well as a very long range to allow use from a safe distance.

For as long as our pet is alive and in melee range.

Each spec has pros and cons in regards to its primary attack. I still see no reason why one spec should have to burn 2 talent points for a 30% chance to do what the other has a 100% chance to do for the cost of only 1 talent point.