Been running it in classic level dungeons for a few days now.
If its this fun at higher levels I might have to change my 120 hunter to survival and give some BFA dungeons a look.
I ended up macroing Serpent sting and Wildfire bomb together on a cast sequence since theyre both one shot with the talents Ive taken. Only really losing 5 seconds on the sting (15 second CD on the WB, SS does its dot damage over 10 seconds, at least thats what mine is showing. I hate DoT’s anyways, lol) and since I took the Butchery talent it doesnt seem to really affect anything since that clears out mobs good, which gives me a good four button rotation like I was hoping for.
Definitely keeping top of the Details charts, though Im sure thats mostly due to the gear rather than my gaming ability.
Absolutely loving the spec.
Uh, wow. Tip: don’t play like this at max level.
Survival thread
Passive-aggressive Bepples post
Like clockwork
I mean, regardless of your opinion on MSV, you have to agree that macroing together Wildfire Bomb and Serpent Sting is a terrible idea and not viable for anything besides world quests and LFR.
It’s not a great idea, but it’s also not actually a big deal at OP’s level and with OP’s choice of talents.
The playstyle changes so much after essences and traits enter the picture anyway that the playstyle you learn while leveling, regardless of what it is, won’t be exactly what you do at 110+
I’m not far enough on the spectrum to have a problem with people playing sub-optimally at low levels. If OP’s having fun, that’s all that matters.
Bepples could learn a thing or two about having fun in a video game lmao, bet he wont tho
kind of like angry SV players whining about every bepples post.
I play all 3 specs, because I’m not a WoD-era player that’s incredibly attached to one itteration of my class and that itteration alone.
Sorry it upsets you that I think lowly of mediocre players talking down to lowbies for enjoying a playstyle, even if they’re doing it sub-optimally. I only tolerate forum elitism when the player spewing it actually appears to be somewhat decent at the game.
Apt guild name tho!
I figure something will change with talents and spells that I dont have at level 60.
Seriously getting 50% to 100% more DPS than the next guy down pretty much every single dungeon run now.
And I have zero intention of every trying to play this game beyond casually ever again, thanks to some ‘real’ raiders who came into LfR a couple times and really acted like spoiled rotten 4 year olds.
well…obviously there wasnt any LFR at level 60 where Im locked, lol
Im playing it as it was designed…a melee spec…and Butchery is clearing the floor up close and personal.
Serpent sting at low levels is ‘meh’ at best. Wild fire bomb being able to double tap is great…but as stated, Butchery is seriously making up the difference on DPS since Im closing in every fight into melee.
heh…yeah. I stopped taking this game seriously over the elitists attitudes coming into LFR screaming at new players who made petty mistakes.
if they are that bad when they come into easy content, i dont want to have anything to do with them in anything harder.
Low level balance and performance is a terrible indicator. The other day I found a low-level Hunter I made in WoD on some random OC realm, slapped on all my heirlooms, and went into BGs as Marksmanship and was legitimately 1-2 shotting people.
heh.
On one my my characters on my wow main account a while back I had a player checking my gear out telling me its like 15% less ‘optimal’ than it should be.
Then the joker is railing on my logs telling me that my DPS was 15% lower than it should be.
He was making a big deal about it as if the low DPS was somehow my lack of ability to PLAY the game…but HE was the moron who pointed out that Id be getting more DPS if my gear was optimized better 
Im sorry. I just cant take these guys or this game seriously anymore.
You’re right not to. I used to be a BIG rogue theorycrafter back in Wrath and Cata, in the spreadsheet days, but the community and the resources available to people have changed.
Now we have this big community of PVErs that treats sims and .io as gospel while misunderstanding the type of fight to which they’re applicable, without a clue as to how the results are derived, carrying themselves with bravado like they personally invested effort into the sim itself.
Rather encourage a player new to a spec to explore unorthodox and suboptimal playstyles any day than lend credence to a sub-500 raider who thinks he’s a hot little bastion of knowledge. Creative thinking skills are far more valuable to this game than the perfect sim result. Playing a spec “poorly” is a better learning exercise than just copying down what gives you the higher paperdoll number.
Well…apples to apples, sure. if I were going to take that hunter higher than 60 then sure…I need to bear in mind that things will be different and at 120 Id adjust what needed to be adjusted…different macros, etc.
I may break out my 120 hunter at some point and do some practice dummy work for some numbers and see what happens.
Looking at the basic math, however, going against mobs up close in melee ranges, the way I have it seems pretty good.
Single target, obviously, not quite as good.
Not to mention having a separate keybind for something that doesnt seem to really do much of anything…serpent sting…at least at low levels, just seems like a waste of keyboard real estate, let alone having to memorize the spell when its not really impressive except maybe to get a few points of damage in before Im swamped.
Double tapping Wildfire bomb did pretty decent damage, but as stated, Im enjoying survival as a melee class and the Butchery talent more than makes up for any damage lost to a single wildfire bomb burst…especially since butcher has three charges and the CD is half the time…and it hits every target in 8 yards…which is where it seems to wreak havoc the best.
Well. Im also enchanted on my gear to the teeth, which I figure most classic dungeon runner in retail arent. stat bonuses and Thundering Skyflare Diamond on one piece and the Mongoose enchant on my weapon. Both seem to fire off nearly every fight thats more than a few seconds.
Pretty cool stuff for casual play, for sure
But keyboard real estate is plentiful even at max level let alone your level. I don’t see a point to not including one of your baseline abilities on your bar. What else is there to put on your bars that’s worth not having Serpent Sting?
Plus, I think you’ll find that having Serpent Sting separately will provide some more interesting playstyle experiences. Survival when it was ranged was never as good a leveling spec as BM but one thing it had that really made it stand out was its ability to constantly pull large amounts of mobs with Serpent Sting and kite them around while shooting them until they were all down. It can’t really do that to the same effectiveness now since its ranged capability is far more limited but multitarget with Serpent Sting is still a thing for you especially at the lower levels when your toolkit isn’t complete.
If you really want to combine them on one button you could do something like this:
#showtooltip
/cast [modifier:shift]Serpent Sting; Wildfire Bomb
This way the button will be Wildfire Bomb by default but when you hold shift it will change to Serpent Sting. On live WoW I only do this for my trinkets (in BGs i tend to have 2 on-use trinkets) since I have enough action bar space for everything else without it (I do use ` for Exhilaration and Shift + ` for Spirit Mend but they are separate buttons, they have different cooldowns, and I’m not in need for action bar space right now; same with R for interrupt and Shift + R for Spirit Shock). But I do use it extensively on the MoP server I play on (shh, don’t tell Blizzard) since we had a lot more abilities in that expansion. For example, I have T set to Aspect of the Hawk, Shift + T to Aspect of the Cheetah, and Alt + T for Aspect of the Pack, which is pretty neat for managing aspects.
absolutely agree with what I think your point is.
For example, tanks hate hunter pets taunt. We all know it.
But Ive actually had tanks thanking me lately for USING the taunt to pull the bad guy off them long enough for the healer to fire off some more heals so we didnt wipe. Thats happened a LOT lately.
If we’re talking dead, cold numbers and not game play, another hunter may have just NOT used his pet taunt, the tank likely would have died instead of the hunter pet and we wipe.
Looking at scores can give a lot of info, Im sure…but it cant show how the player may use TACTICS to make a save that those dead numbers might not be able to convey.
My exwife trashed my credit score with her medical bills.
I always had great credit before that marriage…and once we divorced I got my FICO back up to 825 again where it is now.
A creditor back then would have seen my SCORE and thought I was personally a bad risk, but that is so far from the truth its laughable.
those scores are only part of the story.
??? , it’s still HIGHLY effective at doing this. I pull entire wings of Horrific Visions at a time like this with a latent poison build.
Oh, right, you’ve only spent like 5 minutes playing modern surv, you don’t have the muscle memory for this 
I think the difference in our theory here is play style.
Im not kiting or hitting much ranged. Im firing off Kill Command as Im closing distance and charging into melee and going off with Butchery and Raptor Strike until dead, with firing off the Wildfire Bomb/Serpent sting combo when it comes off the CD.
I did try the Serpent sting first…even took the one talent to make it hit more than one target. It was ‘meh’ at best.
it might be as you say…just different at lowbie levels.
I’ll have to set my 120 hunter up and see how it goes, I guess
For one, ranged Survival had access to Barrage and some minor things such as a lower base GCD and the passive Aspect of the Cheetah. Secondly, ranged Survival had a full toolkit of ranged abilities, most importantly Multi-Shot with the Serpent Spread passive. This meant Survival could not only pull large amounts more easily but deal its full damage potential to them (which was significant; Serpent Spread was amazing) the entire time.
No matter how much you tout Survival’s ranged capabilities now you can’t deny that a large portion of its damage comes from Auto-Attack and Raptor Strike/Mongoose Bite (+ Carve on AoE), Aspect of the Eagle is only available sometimes. So ranged Survival was operating at 100% of its damage potential while kiting while ranged SV is more like ~50-70% depending on traits and fight length. It also really doesn’t help how Wildifre Bomb is conal and therefore has a chance to miss some targets, with that being your only decent AoE at ranged. There is just no way melee SV while kiting stacks up to ranged SV with Serpent Spread.
Of course, you would probably just group them up in melee and zerg them down in most cases. But I was referring specifically to the kiting + zerg strategy in the part you quoted. And being in melee range puts your survival in jeopardy, which kind of defeats the very namesake of the spec. It’s almost like being melee isn’t a good fit for the spec’s historic identity or something. Oh, well.
WOwow, a wall of text from a guy on the spectrum who hates my spec saying it’s not good enough at something thousands of us do regularly, where have I seen this before?!
if only we had some abilities useful for consolidating mobs that we’re kiting into convenient pack sizes…maybe like some sticky stuff on the ground to slow them down
You don’t need 100% of your damage output to successfully dot and kite a whole bunch of mobs to death. You literally only need the ability to run faster than them. That’s it. You’re simply looking for another opportunity to bemoan how ranged survival was the love of your life and the best thing ever.
Horrific Visions are literally the highest form of content where a hunters ability to solo massive amounts of mobs through creative pathing is important, and I don’t know a single surv hunter struggling in them. I think I speak for every survival hunter on the planet when I say that nobody wants to hear Babyback Bepples tell people how viable a spec he hates with a passion is, or how he thinks they should play it.
You’ve got an extremely long post history of being openly aggressive to people for simply enjoying surv. You have no credibility on the topic of the playstyles of the modern survival spec, no matter how much you feel the need to jump into any topic that includes the letters R, S, U, and V in a certain order.
On that point there…is there a picture somewhere that shows the cone angle/size itself?
I mean, I am backing up a bit to try to get as many hits as possible, but I dont know if its a wide or narrow base on the cone…or how far back it goes.
I’m not even saying Survival is not good at pulling large amounts of enemies and zerging them down. I’m saying it’s worse at that than ranged Survival was.
On one hand, it has far better AoE burst than ranged Survival. But a big part of that depends on being in melee; at ranged you only have Wildfire Bomb which is on a cooldown with its CDR mechanic tied to a melee spell. Meanwhile ranged Survival had the potent Multi-Shot + Serpent Spread combo.
On the MoP server I was testing the spec by pulling as many Gulp Frogs on the Timeless Isle as possible and kiting + zerging them down. Melee Survival wouldn’t even be capable of that. The ability to stay at ranged is just not as good as it was in MoP and melee range isn’t even an option on those mobs.