Season 4 Survival Hunter Tier Set Problems and Feedback

Community WoW Community Council
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Hi there,

a thread started by Tettles has received a lot of responses and feedback regarding the S4 winning Balance Druid tier set, as to how the tier set bonus is currently worse than S3, even until you reach max item level for S4, 528. Attached below is the thread that he created regarding this.

S4 Balance Druid Tier Set Feedback by Tettles

In his thread, I responded with a similar issue as to what the Balance Druid set experienced - it got nerfed going into our 10.0.7 patch, almost in identical ways as well.

If this is done for the Boomkin S4 tier set, it should be done for the Survival S4 tier set as well. Blizzard did the same treatment to our winning tier set as they did for Boomkin.
The tier set that won for Survival is also only good on ST, and it’s pretty laughable on AOE. Please revert both of these to their former glory, and if possible, buff the butchery/carve damage on our tier set, or make it so it doesn’t consume a charge of butchery/Carve.

As mentioned in my response to his thread, there are a few ways we can go about remedying the tier set bonus. As this is the final “season” of the expansion, and like Tettles mentioned, we did not know what we were voting for. Understanding that the way the tier set would potentially work the same way it did at the expansion launch, and not the nerfed set we received going into S2.

Problems with Season 4 Tier Set for Survival Hunter

  • Because the tier set makes your next Butchery “free” – of focus – you eventually run out of Butchery charges. This means you have to stop AoEing and instead do raptor/mongoose bites on 5+ target cleave. This never feels good. There is merit as to why this is not a bad thing, like poison injection stacks that should be “ripped” from targets, i.e. mongoose biting a target that has 10 stacks, but even with our current S3 tier set, we already do that at some points. With the factor that Fury of the Eagle will be a weaker button to click going into S4 as we will be moving back to the old S1 tier set, this means fewer bombs to add to the rotation, meaning, more Single Target time.

  • The nerfed version of the Season 1 tier set now makes it so the “free” mongoose bite is no longer “free”, it is a reduced cost. Because it is a reduced cost this makes one of our endpoint talents, preferably the “Single Target” cooldown talent, Spearhead, weaker. Will we still play Spearhead on Single Target even with the nerfed version? Yes, of course. But, because it cost focus for the tier proc, this means in general less Mongoose Bites during the Spearhead window, which in tandem, just makes the talent closer in Single Target damage to Coordinated Assault.

  • This is less so an issue with the tier set, and more so about Blizzards’ variability toward the Survival Hunter specialization. All three bottom choice nodes on the Survival Hunter tree are designed for different goals; the Spearhead talent though, if you look at Warcraftlogs or other sources, is a “weak” talent in comparison to Coordinated Assault for all forms of gameplay (except pvp). S2 and S3 of Dragonflight, on Single Target we opted to not take Spearhead, our “obvious go-to Single Target” talent, and instead took Coordinated Assault, as it worked better with our tier set bonuses, and had interaction with them as well, and the damage was even slightly higher in comparison to a pure Single Target Talent.

Potential Fixes

  • Revert the tier set back to being a “free” Mongoose/Raptor/Butchery + Make it so Butchery charge is refunded. This makes it so you don’t run out of Butchery’s as much on AoE as you did in Season 1.
  • Buff the damage of the “free” ability by 30-50%. This is less so a factor for Single Target, and more so for AoE. Again, because you run out of Butcherys you eventually begin to plummet in damage for pulls that last longer than 35-40 seconds. Yes, buffing the damage in general for Single Target would also make Spearhead a more sought-after talent as well, but we will be forced to take it anyway because of how the tier set works (raid anyway).
  • Bring Carve in line with Butchery cooldown/damage. I don’t know why this is a choice node. Carve deals an insignificant amount of damage in comparison and is not readily available because of its cooldown to be wanted for AoE. With this change, you don’t need to make the tier set refund a Butchery charge, as Carve doesn’t have a charging system. Instead, it will be available when we want to cast it.

I’m hoping we’re able to get to some kind of resolution regarding this tier set. It ultimately makes playing the specialization on Single Target less fun, and on AoE, less impactful/wanted for Mythic+ content.

Thank you,

Strut

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That’s the point of charges. If you never run out, why bother having charges at all? Same as running out of energy or focus (depending on spec), both of those are required elements for the resources to have a purpose.

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Other classes with charge systems are not as hindering as the S1/S4 tier set make the charge system feel.

Fire Mage Fire Blast, when you run out you swap back to Phoenix Flames. 2-3 seconds later, you’re back to Fire Blasting. They functionally do the same thing, but one is on the GCD and is not a promised crit.

Destruction Warlock and Conflagrate, this develops a resource do to stronger abilities - it also has two talents that reward you for spacing out you Conflagrates so you always have one available to sustain your buff duration, which is the real butter to the bread for this specialization. Butchery is to Wildfire Bomb as Conflag is to Incinerate.

Retribution Paladin (almost always takes Crusading Strikes) Crusader Strike/Templar Strike combo, the specialization is so busy that you always have a charge available, even if you don’t intend to.

Even on Beast Mastery if you’re trying to spam Kill Command it’s readily available, and if it’s not up on the next GCD, you just Cobra Shot to get it to be available.

Butchery has nothing like this. It is the tool to get Wildfire Bomb off cooldown quicker, but there is nothing available for Butchery is be readily available do this on sustained AoE (going back to S4/S1 tier set). The whole reason why it worked in S2/S3 is because there were other buttons to click - similar reasoning as to what is happening with Retribution Paladin. But also, Butchery being a tool to get Wildfire Bomb off cooldown, Fury of the Eagle was commonly played (with Ruthless Marauder) during S2/S3. Meaning, Fury of the Eagle was an extension of Butchery, was more rewarding, and even had synergy with our tier sets to capitalize on it.

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Fire Blast and Conflag encourage spacing them out due to other effects in the kit.

Brutal Slash, Butchery and Prescience have charges to allow you to pool up multiple casts for burst (at least on paper, tuning hasn’t always worked out that way).

Kill Command, Barbed Shot, Lava Burst, Mind Blast and others I’m forgetting have charges to protect you a bit against wasting resets.

In all 3 “types”, if you spam the charges you will run out and that’s how it should work. There doesn’t have to be a refund mechanic for every charge ability. Butchery even being picked for sustained AoE in the first place is a failure on Blizzard’s end.

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I can agree to your point of it being a design failure - especially with two abilities in isolation only working a singular direction.

Brutal Slash, Butchery and Prescience have charges to allow you to pool up multiple casts for burst (at least on paper, tuning hasn’t always worked out that way).

The difference between these though are pretty sizeable. Similar to Warlock generating a secondary resource for a pool, Brutal Slash on Feral Druid is also developing Combo Points to do something else - they also have to manage 3? dots, to keep them busy enough to not run out of Brutal Slashes.

Prescience is an ability, designed to empower people - which you ideally want to empower them during Ebon Might/Cooldowns, so, even then, you may hold Prescience for a few moments just for it to align properly.

If we were to bring Warrior into this discussion as well, Raging Blow, similar to Feral Druid and Retribution as a mentioned prior, are busy enough of a specialization that you will not run out of Raging Blows.

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The case mentioned by you is that there are 3 “types” of charge systems, and how they are utilized. Butchery, unlike many other charge systems, works with 1 ability, and 1 ability only. You Butchery, Bomb off cooldown? Bomb. There are points in the rotation where you won’t want to Butchery, such as casting Death Charkram/Explosive Shot/Fury of the Eagle, or Coordinated Assault Kill Shot windows, but those cases only happen once every 45 seconds/2 minutes. As mentioned, you completely run out of gas after 35-40 seconds. That’s factoring in 10 seconds for the DC/ES/FotE window to come in, and then 5 seconds after FotE window is over. What does the specialization do for 20 seconds?

We already know the answer to this, because it happened in Season 1 - as that’s the tier set we are going back to. We Mongoose Bite/Raptor Striked on 5-10 targets and dropped on damage output tremendously.

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The only saving grace to those 20 seconds I would even think about as a remedy if nothing were to change is: Make Poison Injection remove on 2-3 targets at a time when you Mongoose/Raptor? That way you aren’t completely wasted on AoE and can at least do priority/small cleave.

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I mean the answer should be that you play Carve for that situation because it’s not the situation that Butchery is designed for.

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Fixing balance druid’s tier set issue but not Survival’s is completely insane and not helping the dissatisfaction within the Hunter community.

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Carve lacks the power (no synergies with major dps cooldowns) + most AoE Damage has been moved to bombs. They either need to buff both abilities or give them scaling f.e. through hellcarver. https://www.wowhead.com/spell=203673/hellcarver via a node or adding it to the set alternativly add a reset of cooldown per focus spent.

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more than 2 weeks have gone by since fixing the Druid tier sets issues while Survival Hunter’s remains.

Promising you will tune the sets and then failing to deliver on that is just unacceptable, and selectively solving the problem for only certain specs feels even worse.

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Just want to ask friendly - will Survival receive any tuning, or are you too consumed by fixing exploits in a time-limited event ? After all the top logs and keys of survival have been done in season 3 tier set.

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Yeah, a friend of mine who has mained survival hunter this expansion just swapped characters. They do sometimes play MM or BM, but survival is their favorite.

Not only has there been no changes, but there hasn’t even been any real communication or acknowledgement that there is a problem with the set bonus. If it hasn’t even been mentioned by now, the likely hood that any changes will be made seems slim.

I had to explain the problem to a different friend because they didn’t get it. They kept saying that specs perform at different levels. While that is true, that isn’t the problem here. The problem is that gear from a previous season is outperforming new gear and that shouldn’t ever happen.

3 Likes