At least 50% of the time, you have no AOE abilities available. You can fill in some of the gaps with Kill Command, which may trigger Kill Shot procs and allow you to hit only three mobs, but very often you have no button to press other than Raptor Strike/Mongoose while the rest of your party is spamming AOE non-stop.
If you play Sentinel, you can’t even use bombs when you really want to because you are completely forced to hold one out for your Owl because the cooldown to the next bomb is so far out. Holding out for Owl is usually the right move currently anyway, but if you don’t, the next bomb isn’t so far out that you’re completely screwed.
The “heavy bleed” from Butchery is completely negligible and doesn’t come anywhere close to the AOE damage loss. Not to mention Symphonic Arsenal ends up becoming the single worst hero talent available, providing around .5% overall dps (down from around 5% in my logs on live).
This is even worse than I imagined. Having mained Survival since early Shadowlands, I could not imagine it could ever become this bad.
We were in a great place, mostly with some buffs needed to Pack Leader, and yet the entire spec was just turned on it’s head in a very bad way.
In my testing it ended up at around 13.5% of my overall dps, but at the trade off of Butchery moving down to 6.30%, Bombs down to 7.40%, and Bomb (dot) down to 6.60%, and Symphonic Arsenal down to .90%.
Compare those numbers to live where Bomb and it’s dot together being at least 25% of dps in a dungeon, Symphonic Arsenal at 5%, and Butchery itself also much higher.
Symphonic Arsenal is now doing less damage than my weapon proc or trinkets.
Something else to note is that on the PTR, the extra Explosive shot procs when Coordinated Assault ends are not working. The icon lights up to show the procs, but it is on the long cooldown as normal, so those extra procs go to waste.
Good changes overall. These were much needed for the health of the spec; there was too much going on in AoE.
If you think the Merciless Blow bleed is negligible then I am very confused. That bleed is one of, if not THE, hardest scaling damage source we have at 720% AP. There are still some bugs with this bleed, such as:
Merciless Blow doesn’t scale off mastery
Merciless Blow cannot crit
Merciless blow does not ignite or pandemic
Merciless Blow doesn’t get buffed by Cull the Herd
Merciless Blow doesn’t apply Outland Venom
Even with these bugs, just looking at the AP coefficient should be a clear indicator of how powerful it is.
You could say we were in a great place on single target. If you think we were in a great place in AoE, you are just lying to yourself with how it felt to play. Currently, Fury of the Eagle and Ruthless Marauder just have no reason to be taken; the opportunity cost is too high with how involved AoE currently is. There is too much going on.
Pack Leader feels even better with Covering Fire providing a Wildfire Bomb->Butchery feedback loop.
Other classes aren’t just spamming AoE 100% of the time either; they have limitations.
Comparing target dummy tests vs an actual dungeon is going to give different results. They also cannot show if you’re playing properly or not.
How do I “lie to myself with how it felt to play” when I am most certainly not? I wouldn’t be stating my opinion if I felt it wasn’t true. You aren’t making an actual argument on why it “was bad” and resorting to patronizing deflection.
As for “playing properly or not”, where is your proof that you’re playing more properly than I am? I’ve been top dps in literally every single dungeon I’ve ran in TWW so far and it hasn’t even been close. MAYBE Fury warriors end up right with me, but that’s about it.
I quite literally gave you an argument on why it was bad. You should reread the post.
Your anecdotal evidence for heroic dungeons doesn’t mean anything. I didn’t even say you were playing badly; I simply said you cannot prove you are playing properly. I can go attack target dummies, play suboptimally, and then go play suboptimally in heroic dungeons where mobs die instantly and have drastically different damage breakdowns than what they should be in reality.
Luckily there are a couple of public websites for this.
Did some testing, just on the dummies. Damage is totally fine. Once they fix the bleed not scaling in any way I think we come out in a good spot. Was holding 1.8 million on the 5 stack dummies in new city. The down time with no aoe to spam was just a really nice spot to make sure I had my serpent sting on everything. Am I the only one who likes what they have done here?
Fix the bleed interactions and maybe let us apply owl with something other than just bomb?
I also think the changes are pretty good. The bleed is missing some critical interactions in the kit but it should do quite a lot of damage just from looking at the AP coefficient. It feels great to play and gives Fury of the Eagle some much needed love.
suppose you do 1m damage and ability A B and C do 30%, 20%, and 10% of your damage respectively. then you go into PTR and those abilities do half that (15%, 10%, 5%).
That they did a lower % of the total is irrelevant. what matters is the comparison between total output.
The only way to really draw a comparison is to measure total AOE burst, AOE sustain, and ST sustain on live on a dummy and then do the same on PTR.
The only part that was ‘too much’ was trying to weave in RS/MB in between Butcherys for Merciless Blow and I repeatedly provided that feedback on the beta forums. It took some getting use to but it was learnable - now I gotta relearn a more stale AoE rotation and unlearn like 4 years of muscle memory of the rotation for a 15s Butchery. Merciless Blow is fine as a bleed but a 15s CD for Butchery changes the rotation and devalues Frenzy Strikes’ CDR which is a major part of makes the spec fun. Not to mention, it’s gonna make holding bombs for Lunar Storm more annoying with less CDR available on-demand. It’s just clunky and no one asked for it.
I don’t know how you can say nobody asked for it when it was consistently articulated in the beta feedback forum. The entire “GCD bloat” conversation that was brought up every beta update.
I’m also not sure how you have 4 years of muscle memory when you just said you had to learn a new rotation with Merciless Blows being weaved in. That’s a couple months of muscle memory, or just a few weeks if you go from prepatch being live.
There is STILL too much going on in AoE whether you are used to it or not. Fury of the Eagle isn’t usable with the current state of talents. Butchery is, when playing optimally, sitting at 1+ charges nearly permanently because of how much is going on. You can’t take advantage of it.
I think the complaints about Lunar Storm are valid. I don’t know how you arrive at clunky when that perfectly describes the current state of Survival. Having more room to work with and breathe is the opposite of clunky, unless you are referring to holding bomb. That still exists with the version of Survival on live.
This is a significant pvp buff with pack leader and butchery damage though. Butchery doing like 20% of your pvp single target dmg and you didn’t play this before.
I’ve said it in TSL before, but I can repeat it here - unless Pack Leader is doing significantly more damage than Sentinal, it’s not worth playing in higher M+ cause Den Recovery provides 0 damage reduction value or Effective Health like Don’t Look Back. No choice between the two to me. In raid, whatever sims better - I’m not picky there as defensive value really doesn’t matter as much.
The GCD bloat seemed mostly addressed - the original few beta builds and live is a night and day difference and those complaints stemmed from ridiculous CDR on everything in our tool kit and what felt like the removal of FoTE as its long channel wasn’t rewarding. The remaining GCD bloat on live is Explosive Shots at the end of Bombardier and to an extent Merciless Blows; both were addressed. The PTR change to send the ESs all at once is fine but loses some ST value is my understanding. Not the end of the world but it’s a fine trade-off.
