I’ve been a survival player since shadowlands when I grabbed it as an offspec for my brew, I love the spec, will always play it, but this new survival update I have a lot of qualms with.
Going into beta i had like 4 or 5 missing keybinds, taking out almost every active and giving us something like hatchet toss which seemingly feels random (and trying to forcefeed it into the kit on packleader doesnt feel great either), The best fix is replace hatchet toss with butchery or even carve, just give us something to press other than kill command wildfire bomb raptor strike which the spam of those isnt particularly fun in my opinion.
Boomstick feels bad, it doesnt fit into the rotation very well, it doesnt fit into the fantasy in my opinion, it feels like a knockoff fury of the eagle (which would be way better to keep to be honest). It just feels like an X amount of time where ur staring at your character pressing a marksmanship ability. And the little crossbow we had with serpent sting and explosive shot felt nice and looked like part of the kit/fantasy, this shotgun sticks out like a sore thumb
Flamefang patch looks great and all… how the hell are we supposed to get to it, honest to god i dont see a good way to take it when all the great stuff is on the right side of the tree, in my opinion change it to a more accessible position, that will help fix problem 1 and it’ll help the older survival idea which was a master of traps and venom. Maybe there’s something I am missing and there’s a world where we dont take the stuff on the right side which is boomstick cooldown reduction and kill command granting 2 stacks of tip of the spear instead of 1
Oddly enough, reverting survival to a raptor strike spam state and then taking out the talent that had raptor strike apply serpents sting/spread it was a weird decision, especially since once again survivals supposed to be a master of traps and venom, so why are we going into an iteration without the use of any venom at all?
There is a lot of cool things though of course
Strike as one is an awesome passive. Just give it some sort of animation and it would be perfect.
Takedown is something I’ve wanted coordinated assault to be for so long, specifically having it cleave onto nearby enemies is very very nice.
Giving us the option to turn bombs into a bleed, then having talents that increase bleed damage and grant attack speed off of bleeds was very intuitive. I tip my hat to the devs for this, it made me very excited at the first iteration of surv
Shouts for pouring into tip of the spear, keeping it the core of the spec was probably the best direction survivals taken in awhile
All in all, blizzards done good things with survival, but y’all need to figure out what to do with the spec. Are we masters of explosives, traps and venom with a bonded animal fighting at our side? Or are we simply terrorists with homemade bombs and spears.
I’ve been saying this from when they first announced it. It’s weird they want less bloat and then randomly force this PL interaction with a button you will very very rarely press. Just doesn’t feel right.
This is very true and a problem with our talents right now. The 2 stacks TotS is too good to be that far away in the tree, it should be more centralized. 2ndly, it’s counterintuitive that the two points that unlock primal surge buff KC damage, and then the final capstone ability makes it so you will press KC less.
It’s a cool idea but the execution needs to be looked at again. Would be cool if raptor swipe also caused a bleed, as a new talent or something.
I totally agree about Boomstick being out of place and boring since you aren’t doing anything while you wait for the 3 second channel to finish. At least Fury of the Eagle looked better and like it belonged in the spec.
I disagree about Hatchet Toss. I always thought Survival should be a melee spec with the ability to do some damage at range when needed with throwing weapons such as throwing spears, axes or chakrams rather than the whole bomb/tinker thing they keep insisting on. You don’t press Hatchet Toss in melee range but it’s a way to keep doing damage in PvE encounters and PvP when you can’t connect with your target. This is the direction they should go imo over explosives.
I don’t mind hatchet toss conceptually, but it’s current iteration is out of place definitely. Unless I’m mistaken, they even took out the only survival talent that slightly interacted with it. It needs some rethinking, imo, or they should rework the PL talent to buff raptor strike again.
Hogstrider has been updated – Now grants Hatchet Toss and Cobra Shot a 200% damage increase regardless of the number of targets struck by your Boar. Number of targets struck by the Boar now increases the number additional targets struck by Cobra Shot and Hatchet Toss.
Going in the right direction at least, would 200% flat modifier make it viable for single target? I haven’t seen the base damage to compare
If the rotation feels weird with broomstick, it’s not going to suddenly feel better with fury. They work the same way.
Also boom deals great damage and its passives resent the cd of wfb or can be used to generate big stacks of mongoose fury. You can stack 2 tips to use boomstick to go into a wfb or a big raptor strike.
If this feels awkward I’m sorry but the rotation is there and it’s not like we do much in our rotation out side of raptor strike and wfb. I’ll agree we need more flavor in our rotation and I would like to see the hatchet toss passive move to the spec tree outside of hero talents because it would be great to use it more but I enjoy having a ranged ability outside of kill command to use to pull things.
is this going in the right direction? They’re simplifying it a little bit, but it still has fundamentally the same problem in that you never press hatchet toss except in aoe and max hogstrider stacks
As well you bring up a good point, 200% doesn’t seem very good. On wowhead it looks like it’s a 100% AP ability, so 300% AP with hogstrider buff, which is marginally more than a raptor strike (ignoring mongoose stcks). Except raptor strike will be a better use of the gcd anyway because it gives you raptor swipe. So it seems like you would never bother pressing this in single target, which is super lame.
If they just leveraged the bankability inherent to it being a button you rarely otherwise press, I could see the logic, I guess, but otherwise…
I have to disagree here. Like with Windrunner’s Quiver, it too heavily cheeses the resource economy of TotS to feel like it should be central/a “freebie”. It should be a deliberate choice.
The Focus will still be the main reason to hit KC, though, so it’s not as if we’ll be outright halving KC casts so much as simply making TotS massively more lenient.
At that point, though, there’d be no fitting situation into which to reasonably readd deliberate Bloodseeker interaction.
I see your point but I disagree. Obviously we’ll see how it plays out on live but as it stands with flankers advantage, focus generation from takedown, losing the tip gen of fote, some hero tree specific talents that boost focus gen & tip importance, I think it will be very very good, and would like to see it more central because I like the idea of it while being able to play some of the other talents.
I get what you mean about it being deliberate, but if it won’t impact the amount of kc’s you press, then it wouldn’t be a no brainer anyway. Imo the relation between tip, focus, & kc will be different in midnight then it is on live.
This would be the deliberate bloodseeker interaction? Bloodseeker on midnight is pretty untethered, it needs to attach itself to something new rn, this being just one suggestion.
Full disclosure I’m biased because I love the concept of just throwing an axe at something. Personally I want it to be part of the main rotation, wish they would have made it replace kill shot for survival. Make it half the range and apply bleed, keep the chance to proc a free cast at any health %
Honestly, cool idea. Literally any other rotational or semi-rotational usage for the ability solves the main problem in my head. Like any reason i would click this on a somewhat regular basis and it’s fine. I also am a fan of throwing axes at things.
Having a separate skill you wouldn’t otherwise use except in the open world allows them to tune the Hogstrider interaction however they like without worry about excess talent synergy/dependence.
An interaction, yes, but not deliberate, since like Viper’s Venom it’d have virtually no way to avoid applying it without overcapping on Focus.
You’d get it because Raptor is just what you do regardless, not because you gamed out how many enemies you want to make bleed.
Better than just a swap to Shrapnel alone, but… especially if it applies from Raptor Swipe… Idk, just feels all the less mechanically interesting if automatic to that degree on an already high-prio ability.
I agree. my suggestion doesn’t solve the problem and realistally you’re probably right that putting more emphasis into raptor swipe doesn’t really add anything.
I do disagree with this tho. As it stands hatchet toss is basically a stand alone PL ability, and imo the hero talents should reinforce or offer interesting gameplay onto existing rotations and abilities. I don’t think hero trees should insist upon something that otherwise would have no functionality. It might make it easier to tune, but it makes it less interesting.
But then you have little choice in how you interact with the stacks/buffs for that ability.
Now, tbf, that’s not equally true for all rotationals. Lunar Storm had some before, especially in ST, in that it was at least attached to WFB which can technically hold up to 36s of charge before overcapping (between its two charges), and HotPL via Kill Command now has a little, in that you could at least go 3–4 GCDs before completely running out of Focus without wasting recharge potential now that KC has no CD.
But, say, Raptor Strike? In a world with no Kill Shot, no Serpent Sting, no Explosive Shot? The only way to hold it is via your near-neutral WFB GCDs and by recharging Focus that, without prior use of RS, would just overcap.
For that reason, I don’t mind it being on what amounts to solely an open world QoL pulling tool. We’re still happy to have said tool after all, even if it doesn’t normally need to be bound, Kill Command is already being used up by HotPL, and Tranquilizing Shot, Concussive Shot, etc., would all have added disadvantages if used in place of said QoL tool we’d want anyways.
We have plenty of ranged abilities too. Theres no reason to have hatchet toss. Its literally gonna be the most hated ability by halfway through especially if they’re trying to forcefeed it down our gullet with packleader
hatchet toss is the ranged pull tool that other melees have. this community freaked out in the war within beta that we didnt have something like this. now that we do have it people are upset. go figure./
