Small SV suggestion

Ive been playing around with SV in Pve, and its fun. However we have 2 options for AOE, wildfire bomb build, or butchery. Both work and both deal decent burst AOE. But that leaves no sustained aoe option aside from multi stinging, and without hydras bite it is to global intensive to be worth.

My simple suggestion is allow the Latent Poison Injectors to release its stacks with carve, this would allow us to play Hydra’s Bite competitively.

Thanks

Hydra’s works fine without butchery. Latent just needs a buff. Too weak

2 Likes

Hydras bite only works without butchery, they are both talents on the same row.

2 Likes

Good point. Wasn’t using my big boy brain.

Edit: butchery really not worth due to using bombs leggo. Latent was so good with hydra’s in bfa. Was decent in single target as well.

@wingclipt Yeah I agree, altho I think butch is underrated, it cannot keep up with wildfire cluster.

Definitely agree, just unfortunate how ridiculous cluster is.

Something I need to look at further, but when I tried latent injectors prior to the buff, I felt like it took longer to get a single stack. In BFA just waiting for the gcd resulted in a stack.

I could be wrong I just need to get on the dummy tonight.

I strongly prefer hydras to Butchery, Spreading Serpent sting ramps up great damage quickly and it works great on two target cleave.

1 Like

I just want to see, in order of importance:

  1. Latent Poisons buffed and made consumable via Carve/Butchery,
  2. Viper’s Venom to have a chance trigger also from Carve/Butchery,
  3. Butchery empowered to be rotationally useful even in single-target, such as by extending DoTs or very briefly generating Haste from each DoT type you’ve inflicted upon the target (e.g. poison, bleed, unique) or a mere buff to “first target struck” [this needn’t be as significant if Raptor/Mongoose is never given WFB CDR],
  4. Birds of Prey (to be more broadly viable than for pure single-target raiding) also allowed to trigger from Carve/Butchery,
  5. Carve damage buffed slightly and its and Butchery’s cooldown reduced by any other special melee attacks (by 1.5 seconds per cast), while Wildfire Bomb damage is reduced slightly, and/or
  6. Carve and Butchery reworked to be a strong blow at 40 Focus (30 for Butchery) that spreads Serpent Sting from targets caught in the cleave to others in range, to a maximum of as much total duration (across all enemies receiving the spread DoT) as were present across all targets caught in the cleave prior. Already-spread DoTs (separately called “Venom’s Edge” or whatnot) cannot be thus spread themselves, nor do they stack with Serpent Sting, though the two DoTs will pandemic onto one another. [In this case, all melee strikes reduce WFB CDR by a GCD’s time, regardless of number of enemies struck and WFB damage is further reduced.]
4 Likes

I’m for the vipers venom change. It needs to proc more…and would help out single target a bit.

Still waiting for the raptor strike buff but maybe vipers venom would be made viable.

I mostly just hate any and all (pure ST) / (2-3 target or cleave) / (3+ target or true AoE) pigeon-holes.

I know some people on these forums have long insisted that talent choices which amount solely to niche, rather than playstyle, is better, since one doesn’t then need to consult 3rd party sources to figure out how things compete in each, nuanced scenario, but I just can’t imagine favoring choice of niche (which will ultimately be swapped out as often as possible as differing situations require) over choice in actual gameplay (which, when reasonably balanced, rarely oblige the player to swap about, and enlarge any given’s specs breadth and depth of attraction).

Though Viper’s Venom and Birds of Prey aren’t ultimately as pigeon-holed as some (since Carve is on CD and even with its instant damage bonus, Viper’s Venom procs are still best used on targets with 30% or less SpS duration remaining, that just made those adjustments feel obvious, low-hanging fruit for improving the actual levels of choice available to Survival.

Latent poison needs to be baseline, and we should get focus regeneration off of serpent sting ticks.

2 Likes

Why, though? Such essentially just asks that we be even slower to ramp up and have less agency (in that we’d have fewer situations in which to viably burst into a target immediately) and narrower capacity (from that further decreased flexibility).

A truly baseline Latent Poison is much the same. In practice, it acts only to restrict playflow options, narrowing our available viable tactics or shrinking situational negotiation of how we might play. On paper, it’s even more bland—a mere Serpent Sting buff.

Compare that to the likes of Wildfire Clusters, which while certainly dull, don’t shift priorities. Moreover, while Latent Poison requires a full DoT spread (and generating Focus from SpS ticks would often oblige it even before getting just about anything else rolling) to see its benefits, pushing back competing actions in AoE by multiple GCDs if it pushes back them at all, Wildfire Cluster at most pushes back competing actions by one.

I like Latent Poisons as a talent choice, since I can opt in or out as I please, but a design like its is a poor fit for a baseline unless you want to deliberately design a ramp-centric rot spec.

I would say bring back caltrops and redesign them to apply a dot, nature perhaps, after the initial hit. Have spread range = volley(?) perhaps. That would give SV a volley style AOE, that could be sustained.

Baseline? Talent? Replacing what?

I’d rather it not take the same position as Volley does for MM, as I find Chakrams much more unique than a Volley-but-SV, even if it has a faint tradition (Legion).

I just wanted to clarify my suggestion, as it seems a few people are misunderstanding my suggestion.

Latent poison is a debuff applied when your using the “latent poison injectors” legendary, it is not a talent.

Currently the poison stacks to 10 and those stacks can be released by raptor strike or mongoose for X damage per stack.

My suggestion is simply to allow that poison to be released with carve/butchery in addition to raptor strike

I’m aware. I merely typoed. I had meant to say as a choice of legendary. (Hence the comparison against Clusters throughout that post, up until that typo in the final sentence.)

I agree with your suggestion that Carve should release it. I’ve made the same suggestion myself on multiple occassions.

Latent poison should be baseline. Would make serpent sting so much more interesting.

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…Would it, though?

It just adds further white damage that you consume before it caps… in the course of just rotating normally. It changes absolutely nothing about your gameplay except to make fewer cases by which Serpent Sting is worth skipping (i.e., by which your priority list is adjusted to fit a specific situation), arguably a… gameplay reduction.

You didn’t wait for it to “cap” the stacks before using raptor/mongoose typically, and it was nice to have when you had to kite a player or for mechanics to keep your damage up.

It would definitely make serpent sting more valuable as it would have synergy with Raptor strike, which is supposed to be our most important damage ability, by adding damage to it.

Blink blink-blink

Said as much in the same sentence you quoted. Heck, “white damage that you consume before it caps” doesn’t imply that such is an effort, only that that’s what naturally happens.

It doesn’t “keep your damage up” any more than any other legendary of comparable single strength in the niche you’re leveraging. The now cleansable-DoT damage you’re dealing then came at the expense of more direct, non-cleansable damage you would otherwise have already done.

Admittedly, though, that does worsen its position as a legendary option (since it’s at best going to have a slight number advantage in ST/cleave situations that are typically worse for PvP and offers less of a burst option in PvE, let alone AoE) more than make it not worth having baseline.

Personally, I could go either way. But I don’t feel like we need even more reason to always maintain Serpent Sting outside of MB bursts, nor do I feel like as a nonetheless fundamentally melee class we need even more downtime lenience.

For me, Latent Poisons is just a decent enough aesthetic option that should be more competitive. Nothing more, nothing less.