How to Improve Survival Hunters?

Community General Discussion
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MAKING IT RANGE IS NOT THE OPTION. You may want it, but we are working with what we have now.

Now let’s talk Survival Hunter! The forgotten spec of Shadowlands…

SL is almost over it is still feels overshadowed by the other 2 specs significantly and is underperforming against other melee specs. However, Survival still has positives that are over looked compared to it downsides:

Pros Cons
Very high burst AoE damage Hectic AoE rotation
High single-target DPS You will never find a room for two Survival Hunters in a Raid party
Amazing mobility for a melee class Mediocre defenses compared to other melee classes
Easy and powerful single-target rotation
Decent crowd-control

Below I’m going to split this into 2 segments- PVP & PVE and open up some changes that can fix the most fun yet most underrepresented class in the game.

PVP

Simple… revert the revive pet nerf or at least give us a 3min instant revive pet like Warlocks have. It feels horrible to play in its current state. Imagine if killing a UH DK pet removed their ability to generate Runes and Runic Power entirely and had a 4 second cast for pet just so their spec can function again. As a ranged spec this might not be so bad but as a melee that’s just really poor spec design in my humble opinion.

Damage boost to single target would be nice too given that we have arguably the lowest single target damage in the game.

Give it a talent that increases the duration of Aspect of the Eagle not by a crazy amount just for when there is more than enemy you have some more wiggle room to get around them before they all mob on you. If not let Aspect of the Turtle be cast even while under the effects of most crowd control effects (Polymorph, Fear, etc) and acts as a universal “cleanse” removing nearly all debuffs, or just give it Mimiron’s Shell.

PVE

Survival is quite decent, if not good, in M+ since it has uncapped AoE on top of being a melee-ranged hybrid, then less affected by anti melee mechanics. Its main problem is ST damage; even though it was buffed in 9.1, and competing for the same spot with the ranged hunters with almost no change in utility except for a shorter cd interrupt, which means if you need a hunter you will most likely bring a bm/mm.

Just look at every dps spec & M+ tier lists online and again no surprise to see SV Hunter is bottom. It’s clear to see Survival is in a rough place and has been for a long time even during BFA. As an absolute minimum, if you Blizzard are not prepared to improve the class design due to resources and trying to balance all these borrowed power systems you’ve implemented (I get it) despite so, so, many positive changes that could be made to Survival Hunter, at very least a number tuning buff is absolutely essential to revive this class to a playable spec in PVE.

You can spec AOE with talents and do moderate but not overpowered AOE and you sacrifice all single target damage to achieve this. You can spec single target and still be massively underperforming in both single target and AOE. As a melee / range hybrid spec we suffer from the ‘Melee tax’ so why would you bring a melee Hunter when it brings quiet literally nothing that the other 2 range specs provide including the most important part… Damage! Then there is the other side of the coin it becomes downed out in a sea of other melee spec options that also have other utility attached to them. Look at Enh shaman they have Totems, or Rogues with their range of CC, so why can’t Survival have a small unique selling point?

What does this do to the player experience for a SV player? Survival has issues with being invited into groups, or invited and removed from groups because they showed up as Survival and not MM/BM. It’s the unfortunate reality that the general player base still sees SV as the noob/ joke class.

So… How do we fix this? Well Surprisingly easy…

  1. The Quick Fix

Just pump the numbers up!! Very little work needs to go into this. Fury Warriors during PTR got a 10% blanket Damage buff and another 5% is on its way I read. I’m not saying this is the answer for Survival but as a bare minimum make Survival competitive with their damage. This will also compensate for the 2 hour (4 second) cast on revive pet which is a massive damage hinderance to us if the pet dies which they do because you also made them squishy for some reason as if the pet revive wasn’t bad enough… Coupled up with low damage, no group specific utility not to mention the Melee Tax it’s tough for other people to accept a SV Hunter in their M+ or raid groups.

  1. Do a proper job!

As the forgotten class in Shadowlands it’s not too late in my opinion to fix them. The following are some suggestions but really the options are endless it just depends on how committed the developers are when trying to balance the game and a class you designed be relevant to the game.

Some of my personal suggestions;

Gorilla tactics - make baseline.

Absolutely no reason why this cannot happen. If you don’t take GT talent you may as well not have bombs in your tool kit as they do zero damage. There is no choice in this row if it stays as it currently is.

Mongoose bite - make baseline

It is the staple ability for Survival. As soon as haste level increases with gear it will be the mandatory talent to use just like it was through all of BFA. Replace talent with something that further buffs mongoose single target for example increasing the mongoose bite window or make mongoose bite stacks leave a bleed which will synergize well with blood seeker talent. This could also solve the low single target damage that we are suffering from.

Survival specific party utility

As a Survival Hunter you bring absolutely nothing to the table in terms of buffing your party that MM & BM have. This would be the perfect opportunity to give Survival a unique selling point when being invited to Raid or M+. Doesn’t have to be game breaking but something! Could be a % increase to max health passive similar to Monks and DH. Could be combat health regeneration similar to what we have with our pet. Could be a damage alternative, but just give us something that gives people a reason to bring a Survival Hunter!

Give Survival the option to go dual wield (my personal fav)

Like Death knights obliterate (2hand) build vs breath spec (duel-wield) build for Survival you could have.

2h Birds of Prey Mongoose Bite build vs dual wield Wild Fire Bomb build.

For example- Whilst wielding a 2h your mongoose bite damage is increased by 5% stacking (for example) again this would help our single target damage.

And

Whilst dual wielding your spells and abilities have a chance to reduce the cooldown of your bomb by 1 second.

Obviously, the numbers can be tuned but the play style is what I’m getting at here. You have successfully done this with frost DK and other classes why not Survival Hunter? Not to mention the lore of being DW Hunter like REXXAR! Survival is a true melee hunter spec and dual wield add some class identity and some variation to the spec.

I know many survival hunters have many more positive suggestions to make us viable and exciting to play and if your one of these people reading this and haven’t fallen asleep yet then please provide some additional suggestions for Blizzard to make this forgotten class of SL exciting to play and viable.

I’m no pro but by making these changes I’m confident it would make a massive improvement to a class that is so fun yet massively overlooked as this is the most underrepresented spec in the game and for many understandable reasons as mentioned above.

Thank you again for reading and I hope Blizzard does take action as it really is needed.

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Nice job, I like it :heart_eyes:

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Which area and anything that you would like to improve on?

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Muzzle should have its range increased either permanently or at least during Eagle windows. It can be very clunky to have to go into melee to interrupt. It wouldn’t be game-breaking, Elemental shamans get a ranged interrupt even more frequently.

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Make it ranged

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Their theme needs to be kept in line with Hunters as guardians of nature.
The site describes Hunters the following:

Inescapable Stalkers

From an early age, the call of the wild draws some adventurers from the comfort of their homes into the unforgiving primal world outside. Those who endure become hunters. Masters of their environment, they are able to slip like ghosts through the trees and lay traps in the paths of their enemies.

Currently their kit has literal grenades.
They need to remove the whole “technology” aspect from their theme. The crossbow really doesn’t make a lot of sense either with Serpent Sting. You’re telling me you’re holding a tiny little crossbow to shoot at someone three feet away just to put it back in your butt pocket?

Could just be me, but they themed Survival too heavily off the Iron Horde, and not cool original Night Elf/Troll Hunters.

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Survival Hunter is probably top 3 most fun specs in the game right now

The issue is that BM and MM are much easier to play, and Hunter as a class (as much as I love it) tends to draw people who want to play easier specs

I do think it could use a performance boost though to help it stand out more but honestly that set bonus in 9.2 could be enough

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This. Survival should have had this option when it was changed to melee.

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to counter act for muzzle while in eagle mode harpoon to muzzle an disengage to get range an if need to flank back in then disengage to get out

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The theme needs some cleaning up.

Mostly it needs attention! Putting Kill Shot on the little hand crossbow? Why not a big melee strike or something? It show the class is neglected.

The burst CD is “do more damage.” That’s it?! No special effects? No unique gameplay? Compare this to something like Combustion…

There are some neat ideas but it’s just neglected.

I’d personally like to see a baseline mechanic that moved you between ranged and melee. Two slow charging resources/charges/whatever. One for melee, one for ranged. You switch between them to spend one resource, then the other.

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I’d say MM is probably similar if not harder to play just due to pure clunkiness.

I also don’t find AOE all that complicated as survival, kit feels good though.

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A lot of actual good ideas here. As someone who perfers SV over the other 2 (though haven’t played MM since Legion in anything but super basic content), I have a few thoughts.

  1. Having pet management/care be free is already a big plus you have over UH DKs. If we lose Timmy, we can summon him back but it still has a cooldown where, if he is dealt with again, we’re just helpless. It also costs us significant resources to heal him and a ton of our damage is linked to him. Plus pet management is kind of just a hunter thing and makes it pretty unique from the melee side.

  2. I 100% agree SV hunters need to not be so split when it comes to being great at AOE or pretty good at ST, but I think the bigger issue is mot only is it melee in a world of melee options and an absolute glut of actively played melee players, but it is the 2nd or 3rd most difficult melee spec to play with feral being the absolute hardest and with Enhance being either slightly harder or easier depending. The numbers a SV hunter bring don’t compare with a DH or warrior whose button mashing is WAY easier and more effective to boot.

  3. I think mongoose bite should be baseline and how SV naturally plays since that is a unique mechanic that separates SV from other melee and probably butchery be baseline as well (and imo the cleave range feels pretty bad).

  4. Last I checked, shamans also don’t get any special utility between ele and enh and MM already suffers from needing to summon a pet to use hero at the cost of some personal damage. I don’t think SV deserves to have any special utility, but one thing I think hunters could use is a huge dose of pet love for cunning pets in PvE and some unique hunter utility that ties into their environment/terrain would be the ability to remove ground based traps in an area and reduce the damage of ground based AOE (flavor of it would be the hunter’s keen eyes can find the smallest of safe spots to step on/in even in hostile terrain).

  5. I would like to see pets go back to being group utility bringers and think cunning is woefully weaker than the other 2 (at least for PvE). This can be solved by giving tenacity pets the ability to charge to the enemies current target and physically shield them…absorbing the next attack and so long as the friendly target stays within 3 yards, shares damage with the pet by 20-30% until the pet’s health goes to 20% or for 5 seconds or so. Cunning pets can maybe get a passive ability, instead of the active ability, to have a 10% chance on pet’s basic attacks to reduce an ally’s major CD recovery by something like 2-3 secs. This way hunters can find more niche uses and PvE doesn’t just default to “use ferocity pet until/for hero/lust and then swap to tenacity for defensive”.

All in all, SV hunters are a fun and very active and cool spec to play, but the medicore numbers it brings takes a lot more skill and effort to pull off just relegates it to feral status whose own unique issues (being a dot based melee spec in a world where burst damage is always better not to mention being the hardest spec in the game to pull off even under optimal conditions) sees it as a garbage bin spec. It doesn’t matter if your friend’s 2nd cousin’s step kid twice removed did awesome damage in that pug one time…consistency is key and when you already got encounters with their own laundry list of abilities and effects to watch out for, any class/spec that also has a piano’s worth of buttons to micromanage is going to fall behind than a fire and forget spec.

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That’s the thing.
It’s a ranged spec that is made into a melee spec. It wouldn’t be making it ranged, it would be removing melee restrictions.
I think there’s like 2 pure melee abilities in that spec.

Anyways.

Eh. To be fair I don’t think you should have more than 1 spec per raid.

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I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Legion Survival - while controversial, since it was when SV went melee and lots of people were flabbergasted - was one of the most awesome specs this game ever had. It was at the top of this game’s difficulty curve (relative to basically any spec in history, sans Wrath Feral, but that one is…special), and did incredible damage when optimized and executed correctly.

It had a lightning fast APM and was a true melee spec, not this weird “I want to be range but all I have is a pointy stick” spec we have now. I think only Raptor Strike/Mongoose Bite and Muzzle are melee range, every other ability has 40 yard range. That’s not a melee spec.

  1. Revert that horrible Focus regen nerf.
  2. Make Mongoose Bite and its gameplay baseline.
  3. Make Wildfire Infusion and its gameplay baseline.
  4. Revert Serpent Sting to Lacerate.
  5. Reflavor Kill Command to the current Flanking Strike talent - make it melee range.

Honestly, I just miss Legion SV. I am very biased. BFA and SL SV are shadows compared to Legion’s version. Blizzard completely redesigned the spec for Legion, and then overhauled it AGAIN for BFA, basically just making it a worse and flimsier version of what was in Legion. It’s still a “melee” spec so it doesn’t appease people who wanted it back as ranged, but it’s a snooze fest without Wildfire Infusion, so it’s not nearly as compelling a melee spec as it was in Legion.

What happened going from Legion to BFA is a travesty and I wish they would’ve just stuck to their guns post-Antorus and left us with the amazing spec we had. It barely even use Fury of the Eagle so it’s not like any “borrowed power” would’ve been missing as we transitioned to BFA, either. A true loss.

Basically, revert the spec to Legion, but you can replace the old Caltrops/Steel Trap/Explosive Trap ability bloat with Wildfire Bomb + Infusion. Make it a thinking man’s spec again.

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Dual wield and animal companion baseline for all Hunters would absolutely have me going SV.

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Legion Survival was just simply sooo much raw fun.

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I love the way Survival plays but I would like to see an option to have it decoupled from its pet, dual wield, and the cool down of Carve removed.

Thematically I love the hand-crossbow, and throwing a grenade into an enemy’s face!

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This part

“For example- Whilst wielding a 2h your mongoose bite damage is increased by 5% stacking (for example) again this would help our single target damage.”

I feel like Raptor Strike and Mongoose Bite should do more damage in my opinion.

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That is the issue with the borrowed power system and SV could be really great for at patch , but by next expansion after Survival loosees all of that it could end up back at square one. Survival needs to changes that are not constantly varying from patch to patch.

Shamans have totems and I would like if Blizzard would give Survival more variety in traps they can use. It was originally the tree that improved traps and more options of traps would give Survival more utility.

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I am personally a huge fan of borrowed power but can see both sides to that argument.

To each their own on that one lol