Piggybacking off of someone else, it’s like a disarm in which you have to channel 6 seconds to get out of but those 6 seconds can be extended almost indefinitely depending on the CC rotation used.
I think as the game continued to grow and everything else got better pathing just remained as it was. When you’re seeing the classes develop into more interactive and fast paced designs, hunters remain limited to where the pet has wandered off to. I think it may have just been not touched up as much?
What would you like to see in a Spec unprune? Mostly with them going back to class centric design not sure if we would see much of that.
Just the old MoP era ability to change up talents and abilities and what not, unpruning stuff like glyphs which allowed us to look vaguely unique from the other specs as well as making some abilities/talents baseline which make sense to do so (Black arrow immediately comes to mind for hunters since both SV and MM have shadow themed undertones and obviously a pet summoning root would fit BM nicely). Just stuff like that to make each different “spec” stand out rather than giving each Spec another’s abilities or not even changing them at all (in SV’s case).
I’m working on a hunter in the SL beta and you are spot on about -
Hunters Mark - You are spot on. Why was this returned really? While unpruning is an interesting concept (unless you are an affliction lock… which is sad) they are going to far with some things.
Pet Resurrection - again, why? What is the reasoning behind it? Was there an issue with it?
Pets - oh heavens yes. Right now it feels like we are completely locked into a pet family. I so wish we could to back to assigning our pets a talent tree (along with more special abilities for BM).
Please I hope you’re contributing to the Dev Forums, I wish I could, but as this post is trying to do is just generate some kind of awareness since posts there seem to fall on blind eyes and deaf ears.
Thanks for bringing this to GD, Kuvlad. I really do hope they change their mind on the pet res because it’s unacceptable given the state of hunter pets in Shadowlands.
What a ridiculous string of buzzwords. It diluted the class identity, took away all direction behind SV’s design, and condemned the spec to niche obscurity forever.
I don’t see how. It’s a fairly unique spec, and it was what Survival was sort of intended to buff in vanilla. It didn’t really have a strong identity separating it from MM or BM.
I honestly think the ability all hunters should of gotten was stampede. I think it would be cool to have it so you can launch your pack of furry friends onto other players or as part of your opening on a raid boss.
In WoD at least (I didn’t play hunter in MoP except for the pre-patch before WoD), SV had a strikingly different character from MM. MM was very bursty, with Aimed Shot wind-ups, high-damage instant Chimaera Shots, and Steady Shot filler for generating focus. Relatively slow rotation, filled with high damage hits and natural burst windows. MM’s AoE was based around Bombardment, where Multi-Shot got a significant direct damage bonus once we were hitting enough targets to crit often enough to maintain it, making our AoE also similarly bursty (since we’d dump our focus into Multi-Shot, then spend a bit regening it via Steady Shot).
SV was all DoTs. Literally Affliction compared to Destruction here. Our primary nuke was a DoT (though a short one, but the duration did matter at times due to lack of rolling early on), and the significant majority of our damage came from DoTs (specifically Serpent Sting, Black Arrow, and Explosive Shot). AoE was similarly a rot-style concept, where Multi-Shot didn’t itself deal much damage (kinda like BM’s Multi-Shot right now, where it does something like 30% as much damage as MM’s), but it applied Serpent Sting to every target hit, DoTing everything down at once. SV also notably completely lacked any form of DPS cooldown in WoD, being balanced around high sustained rot damage rather than strong burst windows like MM.
Just because the two specs used a bow doesn’t mean they played the same. They had entirely different gameplay, themes, and rotational focus. Saying they played the same because they were both archers is like claiming Affliction and Destruction play the same because they’re both fel casters. And that’s a very accurate analogy, incidentally, because Affliction and Destruction are fairly reasonable caster analogs of how SV and MM, respectively, played in WoD.
I know most people will not agree with me, but I’ve always thought instead of a melee spec for survival, they should’ve made a Ranger spec. In this spec you wouldn’t have access to your pets at all, and your kit would focus on Ranged burst with some kind of flavor skills to set it apart from marksmen, like non-casted high burst output, and probably some kind of melee disengage skill similar to wing clip.
The big thing with “Ranger Spec” is how far do we stray away from being a hunter class compared to being just a archer/gunman? Do we just assume that all ranged people in the game are Hunters?
At least with the ranged survival argument it’s still hunteresque with utilizing poisons relating to animals etc. Just feels like it fits the class more.
Marksman is in a weird place that it can fit a niche of being a “Hunter” in relation to being a good shot for the kill etc… But how far do we stray from the class name to fill a void which is a ranged archer type class/character?
To be fair, MM was in less of a weird place before they took a guillotine to RSV and tried to smash the remains into MM like a PB&J sandwich. It used to be a sniper spec. Now it’s a spec that is a sniper that also has an assault rifle (assault bow?!). MM used to be about a relatively slow rotation with big payoff and burst windows, and SV was about the constant damage. Now MM kinda occupies both spaces, which has harmed MM (and obviously murdered SV).
This is why I continue to call BS on their claim that SV and MM weren’t different enough, because they were literally as different as Destruction and Affliction are right now (in fact, more different than Destro and Aff will be in SL, since Aff’s main shard spender, in both ST and AoE, is now a direct damage effect).
Like, there are literally 9 variants on the “caster” theme in WoW, but they couldn’t come up with a way to differentiate 3 archer specs, despite there being a myriad of options in the traditional fantasy and P&P RPG landscape. Heck, a number of our existing caster variants are far more similar than MM and SV were in MoP and WoD (Destro and Fire, Aff and Shadow).
