Overdesigning Survival then Pulling the Plug

Classes Hunter
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I can’t believe blizzard really overengineered the best feeling spec in the game again, first time since Warlords of Draenor, just to balance it over months and then rip out all the mechanics to become a gimped flat class with no flavor or tricks.

We lost the entire gimmick of the “bag of tricks” from grenade types to procs and wound up with just an extra GCD. We lost our dots and guns (twice lol) for a bad passive serpent sting with a stick.

It would be one thing losing a significant portion of our damage with maybe half dmg procs or something, but they took the whole identity. To add to the injury Wildfire Bomb doesn’t just reduce damage beyond 6 targets, it splits between the pack already (or that “80% to main target” is way off) and then further crushes that damage on bigger packs too. The single target feels okay, and then any sort of cleave is embarrassingly low for a class that used to be its only notable feature.

Here’s to hoping they dont spend another 6 years trying to make/remake this gimmick and continue to overdesign a class that has already had 2 amazing iterations of it that somehow got scrapped at their peaks in popularity, Warlords of Draenor before becoming Melee and early TWW/beta.

Fell for it again ig.

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I’m having trouble reading what your complaints actually are?

Grenade types weren’t a factor at all, you could practically ignore them after BfA. In a world where they are impactful, we would be complaining that they are RNG and one color is more important than the others.

We have TONS of DoTs. What are you talking about?

Doesn’t make sense.

This is not accurate and almost every AoE functions with lower scaling damage

There’s something funny to be said about calling the MoP/WoD an “amazing iteration” when you’re complaining about “bad passive serpent stings with sticks” The “old RSV” was just really boring dot maintenance and pressing a proc. People liked it because it was strong.

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I’ll ask, what are our dots? What dots did we have? How were they applied?

WoD/TWW beta class had more and did more. Black Arrow, traps, old explosive shot, serpent sting is now practically not part of our damage profile.

It does make sense, you just don’t play the class and don’t understand. From WoD they took our entire archetype and made us melee and removed our survivalist trapping thing we had since vanilla, and in TWW Beta we were very much a fast class with tons of procs and mid-range hunter. Our entire gimmick that separated us from the rest of every melee class was our proc mechanics and “identity” of kind of being a scrappy tool hunter and we’ve lost the actual mechanics underwriting the class besides just our “press wildfire bomb”.

Read.
Try to play the class. Throw a wildfire bomb single target vs 4 targets. The overall damage is negligible. This is before the additional multi-target reduction. The cleave just sucks, the feel of wildfire bomb is there but it’s getting double dipped on stacking damage reductions. Was probably done to balance out the cleave damage early cus we have seperate instances of wildfire procing explosive shots on every target creating flashy gameplay and now we have “an extra gcd sometimes”

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  1. serpent sting - applied by vipers venom/contagious reagents (not different at all than serpent spread and you are lying to yourself if you think this is differet)

  2. wildfire bomb dot - applied by…wildfire bomb

  3. bloodseeker - applied by kill command

  4. merciless blows - applied by using flanking strike/butchery

  5. rend flesh - applied by pack leader bear / sentinel dot applied by existing as a sentinel hero talent choice

  6. spearhead - applied by using mb during spearhead cd

you are not only ignoring the current design to wax about old rsv, you are misremembering rsv and how easy it was to play and maintain dots. you did not have to think about rsv. you kept ss naturally and pressed black arrow when it was up. you pressed explosive shot when it was glowing. that’s all.

irony is powerful here, good job

I assume you’re talking about pvp here, cause this isn’t how this works at all in pve

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If I’m being real, the biggest issue I’ve got with survival currently is it doesn’t bring anything BM or MM don’t. “Well yeah, Volgrym, that’s balance.” Is it though? Survival needs to be in more danger than BM or MM, and could certainly use, ironically, a little love for their survival.

Thing is, I used to main OG DoT maintenance Survival (let’s be real, that’s what it was way back), and while I was bent to see it go for a while, I’ve kinda come to accept the majority of what I enjoyed is available as either BM or MM (I find MM is the closest approximate, at least to me). Sorta like how I really loved Dark Apotheosis for Warlocks in MoP, but have since come to accept that’s pretty much just Veng DH now. Well, OG Survival is a thing still, but basically chop shop parted out to MM and BM.

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Survival needs less globals in its damage rotation too. It’s way too gcd heavy. Bomb and explosive shot both should be combined as an example. I honestly dislike the reliance on the pet in survival.

Tip the spear is terrible.

Needs more base mitigation for being in melee.

Hunter needs more self healing.

Trap travel time is annoyingly long at distance.

Hunter pets need a massive revamp and enhancement.

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People who don’t like pets but choose to play THE pet class always confuse me tbh.

What’s wrong with tip of the spear? it’s good flavor and unobtrusive gameplay.

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Literally nothing good about tip of the spear. Nobody wants to spend gcds that do 0 damage to buff the ones that do constantly. Especially since you can’t do this in pvp properly. It was designed for pve and still poorly chosen. They tried this concept on another spec and it was universally hated and revoked.

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but tip isn’t its own gcd, it also generates focus, extends mongoose fury, and even more. it does a lot more than just buff damage.

sounds like pvp is just a mess. it can be hard making things work for both pillars of the game.

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It already does focus so it doesn’t need tip. It’s not a good mechanic. It doesn’t change gameplay in pve really. Just bake the damage into the base abilities so it works for pvp too.

Pve is already going to alternate kill command for max focus utilization so adding a damage modifier to it is stupid.

In general the number of modifiers in the game is a huge problem with the core game mechanics across all specs. Do 0 damage with abilities without stacking tons of modifiers for it to actually hit hard.

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It was an interesting secondary resource and mechanic to play around before we generated too much of it at all times.

It encourages proper play. Too many people that play SV think they either spam KC or spam spenders. It’s a positive reinforcement tool for people to learn and you’re rewarded by doing more damage.

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surv is blah now.
s1 was perfect.
so perfect was gonna focus on hunter instead of dk for s2.
well that fell flat, so ive been playing through my back catalog of offline things instead.

ever hear of this Horizon Zero Dawn? its bloody amazing.

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There is nothing interesting about it. Tag this post. They will remove it.

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You just completely ignored my point. There are far less interesting things in the game that should be removed first. Tip is a fine secondary resource and it’ll be better if we don’t generate a million stacks by existing.

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Great wikipedia thread there bud. My trinket is also a dot and you forgot its .2% output on trigger before giving me the buff. Serpent sting, merc blow, blood seeker, is less than 3% of our total dmg profile and is only slightly better in a pure single target fight, Expo is reworked from a dot and sadly doesn’t proc in our kit anymore which is 1 of the 2 crux’s of argument that the class design was created, balanced, and then cut in half with the transition from procs to extra charges.

Troll posting from a DH is ironic? Its geniunely a bad class now from design to application.

It’s iconic skill does 70% of the dmg single target compared to 5 targets cus it was too good before the rework when u could trigger 3 explosive shots in an aoe and then is absolutely through the floor if there are over 5 targets. It’s like people were crying about 4 explosive shots so they got rid of the 3 of them, the procs and the extra charges at the end and instead have expo’s “cleave” which is one of the biggest problems with that skill just like Wildfire Bomb. It’s single target damage is good but they cut its dmg even when hitting 2 targets by an insane amount.

PvP or PvE it doesn’t matter. The fact that Explosive Shot and Wildfire Bomb double dip on damage reduction makes the class play like trash. If you’re entire kit is 70% nerfed in even a single pack pull then 80% nerfed in a 2 pack pull what is the point? If you can’t even kill a warlock standing in their pets cus the full cleave shares the damage with surrounding targets that already take 99% reduced damage, why are you even trying to be competitive?

But my main gripe is still the fact they spend 7 months making a fun spec and ruined it just as they’ve done time and time again with survival so they can strive to make homogenous classes with no variance in output.

Could be any reason ig. Again, just play the spec and don’t read the skill.

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Man you asked what DoTs the spec has and I told you. If you didn’t want the answer then don’t ask?

Your trinket has nothing to do with the SV kit you’re bringing up irrelevant things.

Incorrect

This does not happen in PvE, you are seeing things that aren’t there

I play the spec, you’re mad because someone is disagreeing with you.

if you think a nerf to merciless blows and changing GJ to not auto applying ES is “ruining” the spec then you’re cooked as neither impact gameplay

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i will say i vastly preferred s1 sv to how it is now, losing a button just sucks and losing den recovery sucks too. i also really don’t like what is essentially wild spirits 2.0 either. i wish we’d have gotten dark ranger instead

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TWW Beta had fewer.

WoD had one non-passive DoT, which was then still damn-near to it (use-on-CD). And without any priority conflicts, at that, unlike the passives we have now.

Explosive Shot stopped functioning as a DoT in any meaningful way when they allowed it to ignite, removing any need to care about remaining duration. Serpent Sting was also made a passive bonus via even Multi-Shot, making it even more degenerate than Viper’s Venom now.

BM is, frankly, a better RSV than WoD RSV. It has the DoT maintenance, the reset on a short-CD rotational, a returned need to actually spread it about, the ramp-up, and the smoothed mini-burst profile it afforded.

Hell, even Dragonflight MM, via Serpent Sting being deliberate via Aimed Shot + Serpentstalker’s or manual Serpent Sting, was still a far more engaging RSV than old WoD RSV.

And that’s coming from someone who played RSV from WotLK to WoD.

Please no.

I could see allowing for a Lone Wolf variant (ideally less than preferred, though not so badly as Pet-using MM), but SV should never disallow or comparatively nerf pet usage.

Pets, high relative uptime (such as via range and mobility), and above-average toolage are supposed to be our major class features. Pets needn’t be obligatory on any given spec (or, no more than one), but they should absolutely be competitive on all three.

That I’ll go for, absolutely. Agreed.

It’s unobtrusive, but is also basically bloat. It feels like what’s happened with the bulk of HP management after Dawn and Dusk on PLD, autos-tracking on Sub, etc.

I do. Well, not specifically to buff others, but to have some skills hit for less so that others can hit for more. Yeah, I absolutely want that.

My only issue with Tips is that it’s just a faintly more jank version of what KC already did via Focus regeneration alone.

What’s the interesting difference relative to mere Focus generation, though? That you might occasionally want to overcap on Focus rather than possibly lose 15% damage on a burst skill?

So did Focus generation by itself. Almost identically. Or truly identically in the case of ST.

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So you want a slower rotation with more downtime ?

What does that even mean ?
Are you talking about AoE caps which every class/spec has ?

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No class has downtime in arena.

Too many damage buttons makes it harder and harder to flow utility and cc while damaging.

Affliction has suffered from gcd starvation in arena forever. That’s why they couldn’t take any talents that added more dots. No globals for it.